The Thracians had developed the artistic crafts to a high degree. Decorative motifs taken from the animal world were widely used in them. The use of the animal body or its parts, conventionalized and freely combined in such a way as to produce bizarre and fantastic motifs, suitable for the ornamentation of the most ordinary objects used by man in his daily fife, is characteristic of the animal style in art; it was used on weapons, implements of production, vessels, and particularly as ornaments sewn on waistbands or placed on horse’s trappings, etc. As it is characteristic of the deccrative art of those tribes and peoples among whom hunting and animal husbandry play an important part in economy, and among whom totemism developed early on, at the stage of the clan order, the animal style found similar favourable conditions for developing in the decorative art of the Thracians.
The earliest example of the Thracian animal style in the Bulgarian lands is a bronze plaque found at Gurchinovo (Kolarovgrad district), on which a number of animal bodies or parts are represented in a highly conventionalized way; the character of the organic original is, however, perfectly clear in them. This plaque dates back to the end of the 6th or beginning of the 5th century B. C. The figure of a lion is represented in its entirety on a gold pectoral found at the Bashova mound near Douvanlii; in this the division of the body into its component parts is clearly marked. Certain finds from the necropolises near Panagyurishte, Bednyakovo (Pazardjik district), Brezovo (Plovdiv district) holidays bulgaria, Radyuvene (Lovech district), Mezek (near Svilengrad) and elsewhere show the following stage in the development of the Thracian animal style in the 4th century; here a variety of buckles and ornaments used on reins are shaped as separate parts of animal bodies or combinations of them.
Completely abstract character
Moreover, their organic forms are so highly conventionalized that they acquire a completely abstract character. In the silver treasure found near Loukovit in 1953, and consisting of numerous objects — vessels, reins and their ornaments — the animal forms in the decoration of two of the pieces are so greatly changed that they unnoticeably merge into the group of plant motifs and are completely lost amid the many-leaved rosettes.
The Thracian animal style is so close to the Scythian that many scholars do not recognize its existence to this day, and consider the objects found in Thrace as of Scythian origin, or directly produced under the influence of the Scythian animal style. Actually, the Thracians had long had Scythian tribes as their neighbours in the northeastern parts of the peninsula, as already mentioned above. They had long established political and cultural relations with them. Nevertheless, the extensive distribution of objects decorated in the animal style all over Thrace, the number of which increases on both sides of the Balkan Range, can now be traced as far as the lower reaches of the River Maritsa at Mezek (near Svilengrad), which leaves us no choice but to recognize the fact that in this case we are dealing with the products of an original Thracian art.
Lilyana Andonova 