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In the News
This article has been translated by Julia Palotay Szent-Györgyi from the original Hungarian language news article found on Hírös.Index.Hu. Copyright is retained by the original author and photographer. Use of this material is for educational purposes only.
Conquest-era graveyard at Harta-Freifelt
2003 march 7, Friday, 7:53 am
 This past Wednesday, a series of lectures began in the Visky Karoly museum in Kalocsa [the city nearest to the dig]. Rozalia Kuster introduced the unparalleled group of finds from the Harta-Freifelt dig discovered in 2002. The tenth-century graveyard is of significant importance to research on the conquest era.
The materials represent the past decade's richest find. Its richness is shown by the several thousand gilded silver fittings found. The most elegant burial, grave 3's noble lady, contained over a hundred precious metal items, and several finds are unique amongst all conquest-era material.
In the Danube-Tisza region, this find is the first small, well-to-do family graveyard to be fully dug up, and all 22 graves have been completely documented in accordance with requirements of the period. Several observations were made possible which provide new information about tenth-century women's garb as worn on the banks of the Danube.
Most burials were in rectangular graves with rounded bottoms, with two instances of [something I can't figure out--the dictionary says "padmaly" is a cavity in a grave, but that doesn't help me much--isn't a grave just a cavity in the ground?]. The graves have an east-west orientation, with the deceased's head to the west, facing the rising sun.
A few graves were disturbed several centuries ago. The reasons for this may have been fear of the returning dead or other beliefs, or simple treasure-hunting.
The graveyard includes multiple instances where the deceased was buried with his or her horse. More exactly, the horse was eaten during the wake, and only the skin, with leg bones and skull intact, was included in the grave. The saddles and tack have completely disintegrated, with their presence indicated only by the bit, girth-buckle, and stirrups. Four horses were buried in female and two in male graves.
The well-to-do, ancient middle-class families buried their dead in their best, jewel-sewn clothing. This is shown by the innumerable silver fittings found in the female graves, the silver shirt-collar mounts encircling the necks of the dead, and the dangling and embossed caftan mounts, held to be typically Hungarian jewelry of the time.
The female graves provide rich additional documentation for the reconstruction of conquest-era clothing. It can be said that although certain types of items, such as dangling or rhombus-shaped shirt-collar mounts and pressed caftan mounts, were found in multiple graves, each grave is on the whole rather unique. In addition to the richest grave (number 3), which included two gilded, embossed silver hair-braid disks and a gold ring, graves 1, 4, 9, 10, and 22 tell the most about clothing.
The graveyard of Harta and its finds provide important new historical and archaeological information for researchers of the period, and form the most-valued part of the collections of Kalocsa's Viski Karoly museum. The finds will be displayed to the public in September.
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