Book Review: Zhenya Zhekova – Stela Doncheva, Production of Imitative Byzantine Folles in the First Bulgarian Kingdom
In the summer of 2024, I received a solicitation by editors of The Byzantine Review at the University of Muenster in Germany to prepare a book review of Zhenya Zhekova and Stela Doncheva’s recent monograph, entitled “Production of Imitative Byzantine Folles in the First Bulgarian Kingdom.” The book is an ambitious and multidisciplinary intervention, which aims to investigate the origin and place of production of a series of cast imitations of 10th-century Byzantine copper coins, discovered during archeological excavations at three metalworking centers in the hinterland of the Medieval Bulgarian capital at Preslav. The sites near the villages of Novosel, Zlatar, and Nadarevo have yielded almost 50 imitations of folleis of the Byzantine emperors Leo VI, Constantine VII, and Romanos I, as well as several tens of metal artefacts (e.g. belt buckles, appliques, etc.) Zhekova and Doncheva use methods from fields as diverse as numismatics, sigillography, archeology, and X-ray fluorescence to demonstrate that the coins and appliques share a common chemical composition and production technology, which proves that they were almost certainly produced in the workshops, where they were found. This scholarly contribution raises important challenges of the traditional view of the First Bulgarian Empire as a completely “natural” type of pre-feudal economy and has the potential of revolutionalizing our understanding of monetization in the lands of Byzantium’s northern periphery.