On a Glazed Bowl in the Context of Funeral Rite of the Medieval Church Tomb in Gorzubitai
The first account of the settlement in Gurzuf appeared in the mid-sixth century when Procopius of Caesarea in his treatise “The Buildings” addressing constructions undertaken by emperor Justinian I informed that two forts, Alouston and in Gorzubitai, were erected in Taurica. In 1951, A. L. Yakobson excavated the settlement in Gorzoubitai and uncovered the ruins of a single-apsidal church, above which there had been a later one. Yakobson dated the bottom church to the sixth and seventh centuries, perhaps partly to the eighth century, according to the pottery discovered, and the top church to the eleventh and tenth centuries. However, the new research of the monument in 2017 discovered, in the bottom church, a collective tomb containing a glazed bowl placed next to the uppermost person. This find allows one to revisit Yakobson's dates of the church buildings. This paper supplies detailed characteristics of the glazed bowl, its attribution, chronology, and the circle of its parallels, suggesting the dating of the find to the middle or the third quarter of the thirteenth century. Importation of such pottery to the Crimea ceased by the late thirteenth century. The results obtained suggest the conclusion that the bottom church still existed in the thirteenth century, though the top church that covered the collective tomb was built in no earlier than the thirteenth century, plausibly later, according to a coin of khan Uzbeg of the Golden Horde discovered near its western wall. The combination of features in the top burial, i. e. the placement of an open-type vessel and two vertical stones supporting the head of the dead, could be of Western European origin. If it was the case, it confirms the Crimean population's connections to Greek territories which were taken by the “Latins” in the thirteenth century.