Belene gold treasure

A golden bowl was discovered on Belene Island in the 1980s. It is an incidental find and is extremely rare - it is made from thin gold leaf, these just over 77 g, it is 7.3 cm high and the diameter of the mouth is 11.3 cm. The body of the vessel is in the shape of a hemisphere, at the widest part it is decorated with 12 evenly spaced 'boucelles' from the base of which descend vertical canelures. The bowl belongs to the so-called 'buckel-cups', known from other finds in Bulgaria, and their distribution in Thracian lands continued until the 8th century BC. These gold vessels were commissioned by local rulers as symbols of power and were also used in some religious rituals. The golden bowl is evidence of the existence of a Thracian settlement in the Late Bronze Age in the Belene area, i.e. mainly at the end of the 2nd and the beginning of the 1st millennium BC.