Derzelas

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A bearded man in a long robe stands turned a little to his left. In his folded right hand he holds out a shallow bowl over a kindled altar; in the crook of his left arm rests a cornucopia, the horn spilling fruit. The bowl pours and the horn fills, the two gestures balanced — a libation given to the dead below, a harvest received from the earth that holds them. This is the figure that the mint of Odessos struck onto its money, in silver and in bronze, from the fourth century before the common era down into the third century after it. The city on the bay where Varna now stands called him by no name at first. It called him only the Great God.

The Great God and his name

Odessos was a Greek foundation, a colony of Miletus planted on the western shore of the Black Sea in the first half of the sixth century BCE, on a coast already held by the Thracians. The Milesians were the great colonizing city of the Pontus, and Odessos took its place among their foundations on the western shore, in time the presiding member of a league of coastal towns that the later sources count as a pentapolis — Odessos with Tomis, Callatis, Mesembria, and Apollonia. The Greek settlers did not arrive on empty ground. A Thracian settlement stood on the bay before them; the name Odessos was older than their coming and may not be Greek at all, with a pre-Hellenic, possibly Carian ring to it, and the powers of the place were older still. The chief of those powers the colony took into the heart of its own civic life. On the coins and in the dedications he is the Theos Megas, the Great God — through the Hellenistic centuries that epithet, and that alone, names him.

The Thracian name surfaces later. It is in the Roman period that the coins and inscriptions of Odessos begin to call the Great God by the word that the native population must always have used: Darzalas, also written Derzelas, and once Derzis. The form is Thracian to its root. The Romanian-school etymology, set out by Sorin Paliga, traces it to the Indo-European *dher-, to hold fast or to support, and reads the divine name as “the powerful one,” kin to the Romanian dârz, bold or unyielding, and to a scatter of cognates across the Indo-European world for daring and for strength. Older nineteenth-century philology, the work of Wilhelm Tomaschek among others, had already set the name within the Thracian lexicon. The god, in short, was a power of the land before he was the patron of the polis, and the polis kept his native name folded inside the Greek honorific it gave him.

That the Great God of Odessos and the Thracian Darzalas are the same divine figure is the standard reading, and the iconography makes it hard to doubt: the bearded standing god of the coins is matched, on a marble plaque from the city carrying a dedication to Darzalas by name, by an image so close it might be copied — the same long chiton, the same bowl held out over the same blazing altar, the same cornucopia in the left arm. But the equation is not a flat certainty across every century. The bare epithet Theos Megas of the Hellenistic coins carries no ethnonym; the explicit pairing of the title with the Thracian name belongs to the imperial centuries; and what the colonists of the early period understood their Great God to be — a Thracian deity adopted whole, a Greek underworld power lent a local face, or something fused in the contact between the two — is a question scholars leave open rather than close. The native origin of the name is secure. The exact shape of the god behind the title, and the degree to which Greek hands reshaped him, is contested, and properly so.

A god of health, of plenty, and of the dead

What the Great God gave can be read from how he is shown and from the words set beside him. He is, above all, a chthonic god — a power of the earth in its double office, as the ground that feeds the living and the ground that receives the dead. The earliest coins of Odessos, the fourth-century bronzes, show him not standing but half-reclining on a couch, the kline, his torso bare, the cornucopia gathered against him. The reclining pose is the posture of the underworld banqueter, the divine guest at the feast of the dead, and across the Thracian and Greek world the chthonic deities and the heroized dead are shown so — propped on the elbow at the funerary couch, the horn of plenty in the arm. To strike that pose on the city’s coin was to declare at the outset what kind of god the Great God was: not a sky-power and not a war-power, but a lord of the ground below, met at the banquet that the living owe to the dead. The fertility is fixed there too, in the same horn of plenty. Health belongs to him by the logic of the chthonic healers: the gods of the underworld are the gods who restore the body, because the powers that govern dying govern also the keeping-alive. It is the same logic that elsewhere makes the Greek Asclepius a hero of the ground and the snake before he is a god of the clinic, and that runs under the whole Thracian field of the rider-Hero and the serpent. The Great God of Odessos belongs to it as a giver of health precisely because he is first a god of the earth and the dead. The dictionary entries that gather his domains name them together — the underworld, abundance, health, and the vigor of the human spirit — and the joining is not a list of separate offices but the single competence of a god of the earth.

The standing type of the later coinage carries the same meaning in a calmer key. The silver tetradrachms of the second century BCE, a rare and handsome civic issue, give him a portrait head, bearded, a ribbon bound in the hair, and on the other face the full standing figure with patera and cornucopia. The bowl tipped over the altar is the offering owed downward to the chthonic god; the horn is the gift returned upward. Around this figure the city organized its sacred and civic year. He was the eponymous god of Odessos, the deity in whose name the calendar and the magistracies were reckoned, the way other Greek cities reckoned theirs by an annual official — at Odessos the Great God himself stood in that place, the divine patron under whose authority the polis kept its time.

His festival was the Darzaleia. It was a penteteric celebration, held in the four-year rhythm of the great Greek games, with athletic and musical contests in the god’s honor. The clearest evidence for it comes late, from the bronze coinage struck at Odessos under the emperor Gordian III, between 238 and 244 CE: these coins show a victor’s wreath, the corona, with the name of the games, ΔΑΡΖΑΛΕΙΑ, set within it. The prominence of the issue and the imperial date have suggested to numismatists that the festival enjoyed the emperor’s favor, and that Gordian himself may have been present at Odessos around 238 CE — a reconstruction offered with appropriate caution, since the coins record the games and the reign, not an attendance. What the Darzaleia certainly shows is a cult still vigorous, still central to the city’s identity, six hundred years after the colony was founded.

The reach of the cult ran along the coast and the rite belonged to the wider Greek-Thracian world of the western Pontus. Odessos was the presiding city of a league of Black Sea Greek towns, and the Great God’s image and the forms of his worship are found beyond his home city — at Tomis to the north, where he appears on the coinage in the company of other deities, and at the old colony of Histria, where a temple to the Great God is attested from the third century BCE. He kept this standing while the other patrons of Odessos kept theirs: the Greek god Apollo, one of the founding deities of the Milesian colonies and prominent in the city’s cult, and the wine-god whom the Greeks knew as Dionysus and held to be at home in Thrace, were honored at Odessos alongside the Great God rather than displaced by him. The Great God was the city’s own, the deity it set on its money and named in its oaths, but he shared the sanctuaries of the coast with the Olympians the colonists had brought from the Aegean.

He shared, too, the chthonic-healing field with the other native powers of the Thracian shore. The standing god of the coins is sometimes set in the company of, or read against, the rider-god of the Thracian Horseman reliefs — that immense votive corpus of more than two thousand carved tablets, the mounted Hero approaching the altar by the serpent-wound tree, dedicated across Thrace and Moesia to a crowd of named and unnamed divinities and bound, like Darzalas, to the chthonic earth and to the restoration of the body. The two are not one figure: the Great God of Odessos is the standing, libation-pouring patron of a single city’s coinage; the Horseman is the riding Hero of the funerary and votive stones across the whole Thracian world. But they occupy the same register of the sacred — the earth, the dead, the cure — and the western Pontus held them side by side. The same register reaches inland to the Getic country, where the god whom the Greeks called Zalmoxis was honored as a chthonic power and a teacher of healing, the deity to whom, in the account of the Greek travelers, the Getae believed they went on dying. Darzalas of the coast and Zalmoxis of the Danube are not the same god, and no source equates them; but the comparison sets the Great God of Odessos within a recognizable Thracian and Getic pattern — the underworld deity who is also the giver of health and the warrant of life beyond death.

Survival in the coin, the stone, and the word

Almost nothing of the Thracian world reaches the present in the Thracians’ own writing; the peoples of the Balkan interior and the Pontic coast left no native pre-Roman literature, and their gods survive through evidence gathered and read by others. Three kinds of record carry Darzalas, and the unusual thing about him is how well, by Thracian standards, they carry him.

The first and richest is the coinage. The Great God of Odessos is, before he is anything else, a numismatic figure: he is known to us above all through the coins of his city, where his portrait was the dominant type, struck in an unbroken civic tradition from the fourth century BCE to the third century CE. The reclining bronzes, the standing silver tetradrachms with their bearded head, the Gordianic bronzes with the wreath of the Darzaleia — this is a documentary series running across six centuries, and it is denser and more continuous than almost any other testimony to a native Thracian deity. The numismatists who catalog the issues of Moesia Inferior and the western Pontus have reconstructed the god’s iconography, his festival, and his civic standing chiefly from the metal.

The second is the epigraphic and sculptural record on the ground. The marble plaque dedicated to Darzalas, with its standing god at the altar; the inscriptions of the Black Sea cities that name the Great God; the terracotta figurines of him recovered from the soil of Odessos — these supply the name the early coins withhold and confirm the identification the iconography suggests. As Dobrinka Chiekova sets out in her study of the cults of the western Pontic Greek cities, the worship of the Great God is the central fact of religious life at Odessos, and the meeting of Greek and Thracian tradition is written into his very title — a Thracian power housed in a Greek polis, named in Greek as the Great God and in the native tongue as Darzalas. The epigraphy of the coast, gathered and read by the modern scholars of Thracian religion, is the second pillar under him; Zlatozara Gočeva’s account of the organization of religious life at Odessos draws the inscriptions and the coins together into a single civic cult.

The third is the comparative and etymological science — the analysis of the name itself, set within the reconstructed Thracian lexicon and the wider Indo-European family, which is what allows the bare divine word Darzalas to be read as a meaningful Thracian name rather than an opaque label. It is the least secure of the three, as such reconstructions always are, but it is the one that reaches behind the Greek epithet to whatever the Thracians of the coast first meant by their Great God.

What the later afterlife adds is the long syncretism. As the Hellenistic and Roman centuries went on, the Great God of Odessos was assimilated outward — read by the Greeks as a form of the underworld ruler Pluto, claimed in the Orphic-Dionysiac vocabulary as a face of the wine-god, and in the Roman period drawn toward the Graeco-Egyptian Serapis, that composite lord of plenty and the dead who absorbed so many local chthonic gods of the eastern Mediterranean. These identifications are the reception, not the original: they are how outsiders and later ages translated Darzalas into the larger religious koine, and they testify less to what the Thracians of Odessos worshiped than to the readiness of the Great God’s chthonic profile to be read as one underworld lord among many. Beneath the translations the local figure held. The city went on striking his image; the Darzaleia went on being kept.

He is, in the end, the best-documented god of the native Thracian shore — not because his myth survives, for no myth of him survives, but because a single Greek city made his portrait the standing emblem of its public life and stamped it onto money for six centuries. The Thracian world that left its other gods to be recovered from a sentence of Herodotus, or from beneath a hostile caricature, or from the mute weight of two thousand carved riders, left this one in the hand, in coin after coin, a bearded god at his altar with the bowl tipped and the horn full.

Bronze coin of Odessos, modern Varna, struck in the reign of Gordian III (238–244 CE) — the reign whose civic issues carry the wreath of the Darzaleia, the games of the Great God Darzalas. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département des Monnaies, médailles et antiques, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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