Dynastic History | Madara Rider — The Court Cut Its Treaties in Greek

What makes the cliff at Madara a historical document is not the horseman but the writing around him. Three badly weathered texts are cut into the rock beside the relief, some twenty-three metres above the ground, and the published readings render them in medieval Greek: the language of the empire the Bulgar court was dealing with, not the one it spoke.

The oldest belongs to Tervel, who ruled from 701 to 718, and concerns a settlement with the emperor Justinian II, a payment, and a campaign the text says the emperor won with Bulgar help. A second is about gold from Constantinople, promised yearly and then argued over. Two more were set by Omurtag (814-831), one of them recording an offering to the god Tangra. Who commissioned the second is unsettled: the World Heritage description of the property names Kormisos, while the translations published by Kiril Petkov read the name as Krumesis. The relief itself carries no date, and is placed in Tervel's reign because the earliest inscription is his.

The horseman's halo, his garments and the bird before his face have largely gone to erosion. Excavations between 1924 and 1935, about 250 metres north, found a rectangular building and a shrine below the rock. The cliff was inscribed on the World Heritage list in 1979, on a property of 1.2 hectares. In 1991 UNESCO recorded the monument as in great danger from the instability of the rock itself, and noted that the Bulgarian authorities had considered moving the sculpture, against the advice of the expert sent to assess it. It is still on its cliff, above a ticket office and a stair.

📸 Cover: The Madara Rider relief, PlusUA, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons