The Stećci: Medieval Tombstones of Bosnia

On a hillside at Radimlja, near Stolac in Herzegovina, about 130 great blocks of limestone lie in rows beside the road. Some are flat slabs, some chests, some shaped like little houses with gabled roofs. Their sides are carved with spirals, vines, crescents, horsemen hunting deer, and a line of dancers holding hands. On one, a man stands with his right hand raised and open, the hand carved larger than life. These are stećci (singular stećak), the medieval tombstones of Bosnia and its neighbours, and for a century and a half they were wrongly known as the graves of heretics.

The tombstones

• About 70,000 stećci are recorded at some 3,300 sites, most in Bosnia and Herzegovina, others in Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia.
• They date from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, most from the fourteenth and fifteenth.
• Most are undecorated; a minority carry carved ornament or figures, and a smaller number inscriptions in bosančica, the Bosnian form of Cyrillic.
• In 2016, 28 of the sites, with some 4,000 stones, were inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Bogomil myth

In the nineteenth century, scholars linked the stećci to the Bogomils, a dualist movement of the medieval Balkans that taught that the material world was the work of an evil power (see Gnosticism, ch17, and Manichaeism, ch55). Medieval Bosnia had its own church, the Bosnian Church, which its Catholic and Orthodox opponents accused of that heresy. The idea that the stećci were "Bogomil tombstones" became popular and is still repeated.

Modern historians and archaeologists reject it. Stećci are found in areas that were Catholic and Orthodox as well as in the lands of the Bosnian Church; some bear crosses and Christian inscriptions; and they were used by all three communities, as UNESCO's description states. Whether the Bosnian Church itself was dualist is also debated.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The raised hand. The best-known figure has been read as a greeting, an oath, a gesture of prayer, or a sign of rank. There is no medieval explanation.

Sky signs. Crescents, stars and discs are common. Because the crescent later became associated with Islam, some have read them as Muslim, but they appear on stones made before the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia in 1463, and were part of older Christian and folk symbolism.

Life carved in stone. Hunting scenes, tournaments and the kolo, the circle dance still danced in the region, may show the life of the dead person, a funeral rite, or both.

House-shaped tombs. Gabled stećci resemble houses, echoing the widespread idea of the grave as the home of the dead.

The interactive cards above set out the main motifs.

Connections

Eastern Orthodoxy & Byzantium (ch60), and Gnosticism (ch17) and Manichaeism (ch55) for the Bogomils. Compare the Pictish Stones (V70), another set of carved stones whose symbols are unexplained.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/stecci.html