Journal Analele Banatului N.S. Archaeology-History

Daniela Tănase

DESPRE PIESELE DE TIP SUCIDAVA DIN COLECȚIA LUI IMRE PONGRÁCZ AFLATE ÎN PATRIMONIUL MUZEULUI NAȚIONAL AL BANATULUI DIN TIMIȘOARA

Jan. 1, 2022

Abstract

Over the course of time, the early Byzantin belt buckles and mounts of the Sucidava-type from Imre Pongrácz's collection, acquired by the Timișoara museum in 1903, have been included in scientific papers from a typological perspective or in relation to their Christian symbolism. In these publications, wrong information appeared regarding the place of discovery, or pieces were illustrated as being from Orșova and implicitly from the collection of the museum in Timișoara, although they never appeared in its inventory and probably not even in the Pongrácz collection. In reality, according to the information written on the plates with drawings drawn up by the collector, the discovery site of the Sucidava-type objects is located south of the Danube (Pl. III) or is not mentioned at all (Pl. I-II, Pl. IV). I tried to establish how many pieces existed with certainty in the collection and where exactly they were discovered based on the documents kept at the National Museum of Banat in Timișoara (lists and inventory registers, the album with plates drawn by Imre Pongrácz), as well as at the National Museum Hungarian from Budapest (the inventory register from the end of the 19th century and the notebook with drawings prepared by Nándor Fettich, who visited the museum in Timișoara on July 24, 1925). From the bibliography and documents consulted, it follows that there were five Sucidava-type objects in Imre Pongrácz's collection, a buckle and four belt mounts, of which the four illustrated on plate V in this study were still preserved in the museum in Timișoara. The fifth object (a belt mount), illustrated in this study in plate VI (the first piece on the upper lef)t, was offered in exchange in 1929 to the Budapest antiquarian László Mautner, and we do not know its subsequent fate. Therefore, the illustrations and information published by Joachim Werner (1955) and Dezső Csallány (1962) regarding the Sucidava-type objects in the Timișoara museum are partially wrong. In relation to the place of discovery, we believe that the Sucidava-type pieces from Imre Pongrácz's collection do not come from the north of the Danube, nor in any case from Orșova, the ancient Dierna. The confusion was created due to the fact that they are part of a collection whose owner lived in Orșova. They most likely come from localities placed in the Iron Gates region, on the southern bank of the Danube river (Pl. VII). Unfortunately, we will never know from where exactly, because as can be seen from the plates drawn by himself, the collector was not concerned with the context of the discovery of the objects, which were overwhelmingly provided to him by two Serbs from Kladovo, Serbia.