Dynastic History | Great Basilica, Pliska — The First Capital Was Dug as Aboba

Digging began on 6 October 1899 and stopped on 10 November: five weeks of work in a village then called Aboba. The excavation belonged to the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople, under its director Fyodor Uspensky, with Karel Skorpil doing much of the work on the ground. In that first season the two structures afterwards called the Throne Palace and the Great Basilica came out of the field. The results were printed in Russian in 1905, in volume X of the institute's proceedings, with an album of photographs and plans.

What they had opened was the first capital of the Bulgarian state, and nearly every part of that phrase has been argued over since. The account that Asparuh founded Pliska in the late seventh century has no archaeological support. Some scholars have proposed that the place was a seasonal residence, and that its rulers moved between several. Joachim Henning, reading the stratigraphy of the pit-houses, has argued that the basilica may be far later than the ninth-century date long attached to it. What is not disputed is the labour the state could command here: the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium gives the outer earthwork as some twenty-one kilometres of stone-faced rampart enclosing roughly 2,300 hectares.

Excavation resumed under Krastyu Miyatev in 1931 and has continued in campaigns since. In September 2016 work began on laying a new marble floor across more than three thousand square metres of the basilica, paid for from the state budget and by donors. The following June a civic heritage group wrote to the culture minister objecting that what was going up was new construction standing on the original foundations.

📸 Cover: The nave of the Great Basilica, its column shafts re-erected, Vislupus, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons