"Around the Meotid Lake, along the Kufis River, lies the old, so-called, great Bulgaria."
The territory described by the Byzantine patriarch Nicephorus between the Dnieper River and the North Caucasus in the 30th century was inhabited by Bulgarian tribes. In the XNUMXs of the same century, the Bulgarians, under the rule of Khan Kubrat of the Dulo family, in alliance with the Byzantine Empire, rejected dependence on the Avar Khaganate and founded Great Bulgaria.
Evidence of its power is the treasure from the village of Malaya Pereshchepina, discovered by chance on May 29, 1912. It includes nearly 800 objects - gold and silver vessels, weapons and horse equipment, ornaments and Byzantine coins, today stored in the State Hermitage - St. Petersburg, Russia. The heterogeneous composition of the find, including objects produced in Byzantium, Sassanid Iran, as well as those, the work of a steppe workshop with analogies among Avar, Turkic and Sogdian artistic traditions, gives rise to various hypotheses about its ethnocultural affiliation.
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Today, the treasure is identified as the grave goods of a noble nomad ruler from the middle of the XNUMXth century. Characteristic of the rite, which included cremation, the richness of the goods suggests a burial according to pagan traditions. This circumstance, as well as the presence of Christian items, and especially the rings with cross-shaped monograms, read as "Kubrat", "of Kubrat patricia" connect the treasure with the founder of Great Bulgaria - Khan Kubrat.
In 1989, the State Hermitage organized a temporary exhibition "Treasure of Khan Kubrat. Culture of Bulgarians, Khazars, Slavs", which is visiting the halls of the National History Museum in Sofia. It includes a large part of the objects found near the village of Malaya Pereshchepina, as well as monuments of the synchronous cultures of Bulgarians, Slavs and Khazars from the area of the Northern Black Sea steppes from the period VI - VII centuries. The identification of the find as the grave of Khan Kubrat, directly connects with the dawn of Bulgarian statehood. For this reason, with the permission of the experts from the Hermitage, silicone impressions were taken of some of the visiting monuments without damaging the originals. Today, copies of this significant treasure for Bulgarian history are part of the permanent exhibition of the National History Museum in Sofia. Author: Ch. Associate Professor Mariela Inkova Photos: Rosen Kolev and Todor Dimitrov
