Starosel

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A man climbing the southern slopes of the Sredna Gora would have seen it for what it was meant to be: a hill among hills, grass over a swell of earth, with a band of dressed stone running round its foot like a belt. The stone is granite, set in courses, and it holds its line across two hundred and forty-one meters of curving wall. Nothing on the surface said temple. The temple was inside — sealed in the mound, a chamber of cut stone with a domed roof and a ring of half-columns, reached by a stair that climbed to a doorway and then turned inward, down a corridor, into the dark. The earth was the wall. The mound was the building’s last and largest course.

This is the cult complex near the village of Starosel, in the hills north of the Thracian plain, in what is now Hisarya municipality of Plovdiv Province in Bulgaria. The principal mound carries the name Chetinyova Mogila — Chetinyova’s Mound. It is the largest Thracian cult-and-burial complex yet uncovered, and it was hidden under its own hill until the very end of the twentieth century. (the record of the site and its temples is recent, and still being argued over.)

The mound and its makers

The Thracians who raised this place left no books, no inscription that names its builder, no native account of what it was for. What stands at Starosel is architecture and earth, and the architecture has to be read. The reading places the complex in the late fifth and the fourth centuries before the common era — the age when the Odrysian kingdom, the great Thracian state that ran from the Aegean shore to the Danube, was at the height of its reach. The country around the mound was royal country. A short way off, on the heights at Kozi Gramadi, the dressed stone of a fortified residence has come up out of the ground, a seat of the Odrysian kings begun in the early fourth century. Starosel sat in the orbit of that power.

The first thing to grasp about the place is its scale, and the second is that it is not one monument but a field of them. The slopes carry a scatter of mounds. Two have given up temples. The mound called Chetinyova holds the great round chamber and its encircling wall. A second mound, a little way off and called Horizont, holds a structure unlike anything else found in the Thracian world: a heroon fronted by a true colonnade. Around them lie lesser tumuli, a rock-cut shrine, and the diggings of a sanctuary that was used and re-entered rather than sealed once and forgotten.

The encircling wall at Chetinyova is the signature of the place. It is called a krepida — a retaining wall of dressed blocks laid round the base of a tumulus to hold the earth and to mark the foot of the sacred mound. Here the krepida is granite, roughly three hundred blocks of it, running two hundred and forty-one meters around the hill and standing in places to about three and a half meters. It does not enclose a square. It draws a circle. The excavator and those who have followed him read that circle as deliberate — the sun’s round, the solar figure that recurs across the sacred architecture of these peoples, from the andesite disc set into the mountain in the Carpathians to the rock-cut basins of the Rhodope sanctuaries. That a Thracian builder meant the wall to read as the sun is an interpretation, not a caption the Thracians left. But the circle is unmistakable, and it is enormous, and it was built to be seen.

On one side the wall opens to a monumental stair. The stair is broad, a parade approach, and at its head stood two pedestals — bases that once carried statues of lions, the guardians at the threshold. Past the lions the visitor passed through a doorway and a rectangular antechamber, and only then reached the innermost room. The doorways themselves bear the marks of long use: their pivots and sills are worn, the doors swung again and again, which is why the excavator argued the place was not a tomb shut after a single funeral but a sanctuary entered and re-entered over generations.

The temple in the mound

The innermost room is the heart of Starosel, and it is round. It is a chamber a little over five meters across, roofed with a dome of cut stone, and around its wall runs a ring of ten Doric half-columns — pilasters engaged in the masonry, carrying an entablature with triglyphs above them, the stone still holding its paint in blue and red where the light has not reached it. A round, domed, colonnaded room buried in a Thracian mound is a thing without parallel in the native architecture, which is why the place mattered the moment it was opened. The half-column and the triglyph are Greek forms; the round chamber under the earthen mound is Thracian practice; and the marriage of the two is the thing itself — the Greek architectural vocabulary taken up by a Thracian aristocracy and bent to a Thracian end.

The light was built into it. The chamber faces so that the sun reaches into the lower part of the room only at the turn of the year, around the winter solstice; for the rest of the year the upper register stays in shadow, which is why its colors survive so well. A buried room that the sun enters once a year, at the year’s lowest point, is a hard thing to read as accident.

Against the wall, in the round room, stood a stone seat — a bench cut and set for the one who presided, or for the one who was honored. Here the building stops being a description and becomes a question. The excavator who opened Chetinyova in the year 2000, the Bulgarian archaeologist Georgi Kitov, read the whole complex as a temple raised to a deified ruler: a place where a Thracian king-priest was buried and then worshiped, where the round chamber and its seat served the rites of a ruler-cult, and where — Kitov proposed — the mysteries of a Thracian Orphism were performed for a few initiates, rites meant to carry the dead king across into the company of the gods, to make of the mortal an anthropodaemon, a being between man and god. That reading binds Starosel to the wider Thracian conviction that the great dead did not simply die. (scholarship on Thracian religion sets the heroized ruler and the priest-king at the center of the aristocratic cult, and Starosel is its grandest stone.)

Within the frame of that world the logic is whole. The Thracian aristocrat was not extinguished at death; he was raised among the heroized dead, the company gathered around the figure the dedications would later name simply the Heros — the Rider, met at the altar by the tree and the serpent, the deified ancestor of a thousand reliefs. A king honored at Starosel would have joined that company. The mound is the threshold; the wall is the sun’s circle drawn around it; the round room is where the living met the heroized dead, and the stone seat is where the rite was kept. Rendered from inside, the building is an instrument for crossing over.

What the stone seat was for, in operative terms, the site does not say, and this account will not invent it. The seat is there; the rite is inferred; the inference is Kitov’s, and it is contested.

Whose tomb, and which rite

The hard problems at Starosel are the ones the architecture cannot settle. They fall into three honest piles.

The first is firm: the archaeology itself. The krepida and its length, the parade stair and the lion-pedestals, the antechamber, the round domed chamber and its ten half-columns, the worn doors, the solstice alignment, the dressed-granite construction, the dating to the late fifth and fourth centuries, the excavation by Kitov in 2000 and the opening of the colonnaded Horizont temple in 2002 — these are recovered, measured, and reported. The companion mounds gave up their own evidence: a high-ranking burial at Horizont with bronze arrowheads, silver beads, and gold appliqués for the dead man’s clothing; elsewhere a cenotaph, an empty grave, with a gold ring, horse-trappings, and arms; and a basin cut to make and hold wine, with the drinking-vessels and strainers that go with it. This is the scholarly register, and it is solid ground.

The second pile is the interpretation, and it is softer. That the complex was a temple and not only a tomb; that it served a cult of the dead ruler; that the rites performed in the round chamber were Orphic mysteries of immortalization — these are Kitov’s readings, built from the worn doors, the rock shrine nearby, the unusual architecture, and the known shape of Thracian royal religion. They are coherent and they are widely repeated, but they are inference, and other archaeologists weigh the same evidence as the architecture of a princely tomb in the monumental Thracian manner without committing to the full apparatus of a functioning ruler-cult. The Thracian record gives no inscription to decide it.

The third pile is the name. Tradition and the guidebooks like to make Starosel the tomb of Sitalces, the Odrysian king who in the late fifth century carried Thracian power from the Danube to the Aegean and whom the Athenians counted as an ally — a name out of Thucydides, a king of the first rank. The trouble is chronology. Sitalces fell around 424 BCE; the architecture and the associated royal residence point rather to the middle of the fourth century, to the reign of a later Odrysian, Amadocus II. No object from the mounds carries a royal name. The attribution to Sitalces is a guess attached to a great king because the monument is great; it should be held as a guess and no more. Who lay under Chetinyova’s dome is, in plain terms, unknown.

So the registers stay distinct. The wall is two hundred and forty-one meters long: that is measured. The dead king was heroized and crossed over to the gods: that is the world the builders inhabited, rendered as they held it. Whose body it was, and whether the round room hosted a true cult or only a splendid funeral: that is argued, and the honest answer is that we do not yet know.

The Chetinyova Mogila cult complex near Starosel: the curving krepida of dressed granite at the foot of the mound and the parade stair to the temple within. Vladislav Nedelev, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

The colonnade in the second mound

The mound called Horizont sets the complex apart even from the rest of the Thracian world. Opened in 2002, it held a heroon — a hero’s shrine and tomb — fronted by ten free-standing Doric columns in the early manner, each raised on a base, drum on drum, under a capital. No other Thracian tomb yet found carries a true colonnade. It is the one place where the Greek temple-front steps fully out of the masonry and stands free, a façade in the open, and it stands in front of a Thracian burial.

That single fact carries the larger story of these mounds. The Thracian aristocracy of the classical age lived along the seam of the Greek world. It drank from Greek silver and bought Greek architects, and it set the column and the triglyph and the painted entablature in front of, and around, its own ancestral practice of burial under the mound. The result at Starosel is neither Greek nor a copy of anything Greek. It is a Thracian sacred architecture that has taken the Doric order into itself — half-engaged in the round chamber at Chetinyova, free-standing across the front at Horizont — and made of it a frame for a Thracian rite of the heroized dead.

The temple in the Horizont tumulus near Starosel, unique in the Thracian world for its colonnade of ten columns in the early Doric style. Vassia Atanassova (Spiritia), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Reception and afterlife

For most of its long life Starosel was simply a green hill, one of thousands of mounds across the Thracian lands, its temple sealed inside it and forgotten. The afterlife that matters here is recent and is the work of the spade. When Georgi Kitov drove a trench into Chetinyova in 2000 and came out the other side of the earth into a round, painted, domed room, the find was reported as the largest Thracian cult complex known, and the village name passed into the literature. Two years later the colonnaded heroon under Horizont confirmed that the place was not a single freak monument but a sanctuary-field, a whole royal cult-landscape on the slopes of the Sredna Gora. The complex now stands open, its krepida and stair and round chamber walked by visitors, one of the set pieces of the Thracian heritage that the tourism record of Bulgaria places beside the painted tomb at Kazanlak and the rock cities of the Rhodopes.

Its reception is also an argument. Kitov, who excavated more Thracian mounds than any man of his generation, read Starosel boldly — as temple, as ruler-cult, as the stone setting of a Thracian Orphic mystery, and, in his more confident moods, as the resting place of a named king. Those readings made the site famous and made it disputed. The cautious position holds the architecture and the finds as certain, the function as a probable cult-and-burial complex of the Odrysian aristocracy, and the Orphic apparatus and the royal name as proposals that the mute evidence cannot yet confirm. Both positions agree on the thing in the ground.

What is not in doubt is what the place was built to do. It gathered the powers of a sacred world into one swell of earth: the sun’s circle drawn in granite around the mound, the buried room that the light entered once a year, the seat where the dead king was met, the colonnade standing before the grave of a man his people would not let simply die. The mound was meant to hold a crossing. It still holds the architecture of one, two hundred and forty-one meters of dressed stone around a domed room in the dark, on the southern slopes of the Sredna Gora, where the Odrysian kings raised the largest of their houses for the heroized dead.

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