Thracian tomb Ostrusha

Worth a detour

The central chamber here was hollowed out of one block of stone weighing around sixty tonnes, and roofed with a second monolith carved on the outside as a Greek temple roof. The underside of that roof is divided into coffers, each painted. It is a twenty-minute stop on the Kazanlak tomb circuit, and the engineering is as remarkable as the painting.

Story

Background

Ostrusha was excavated in 1993, under a mound more than eighteen metres high in the belt of tumuli between Shipka and Kran that gets called the Valley of the Thracian Kings. What came out was not a single chamber but a complex of six rooms over about a hundred square metres, built in the middle of the fourth century BC — the period when the Odrysian aristocracy was at its wealthiest and most Hellenised.

The centrepiece is a sarcophagus-chamber carved out of a single monolith, sealed by a second stone cut on its exterior into the pitched roof and tiles of a Greek temple. Moving and shaping stone on that scale in the fourth century BC, up a hillside, is the part that stops people. The inner face of the roof block is laid out as a coffered ceiling, each coffer painted with portraits, human scenes, animals in combat, plants and geometric ornament.

Much of that painting has gone. What survives best is a small head of a woman with long brown hair, gold earrings and a necklace, executed with a delicacy that belongs to the same world as the Kazanlak frescoes a few kilometres away. It has been studied hard precisely because so little Hellenistic panel-scale painting survives anywhere. Go in knowing the chamber is small and the light is low; what you are there for is one face and one very large stone.