Varna I necropolis: 3,100 gold objects, two-thirds of them in six graves

October 24, 2026BulgariaGeneralShare

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Key facts

• The Varna I cemetery near Varna in present-day Bulgaria dates to about 4600-4300 BC and was used for roughly 250 years.
• Roughly 3,100 gold objects weighing around 6.5 kg (over 14 lb) plus about 160 copper implements were recovered.
• The most recent accounting lists 327 burials, of which only about 60-70 contained gold.
• Grave 43 alone held around 990 gold objects weighing about 1.5 kg (3.3 lb), roughly a quarter of the cemetery's total gold.
• Six graves - 1, 4, 36, 41, 43 and 63a - together held about two-thirds of the cemetery's gold objects.
• Colin Renfrew treated Varna as an important discovery because farming communities that look egalitarian in their houses and everyday equipment show extreme inequality in their burials.
• Varna belongs to the grouping termed 'Old Europe' (a term introduced by Maria Gimbuts), covering southeastern European farming communities linked by technology, genetics and trade, not an empire.
• The video notes Varna's farmers arrived with farming already established in Anatolia, roughly a thousand years earlier, and that Catalhoyuk and Gobekli Tepe predate the Varna period by about 2,000 and 4,000 years respectively.

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