Ebook: Z głębin czasu: Opowieść o pewnej rybie = From the Depth of Time: A Tale About a Fish

Text in Polish and English.

It is common knowledge that there is no such thing as a miracle. So it is not easy to believe in one when it happens. But it was a miracle that occurred in Pomerania – for how else can you describe the situation that transpired in the ancient cemetery in Czarnówko near Lębork? Here, under the only building, built right in the middle of this necropole, a delicate and fragile object was discovered: a fish-shaped glass bottle. Does it not seem a miracle that this vessel, made somewhere in the Roman Empire over one and a half thousand years ago, has survived almost intact to this day? And is it simply a coincidence that the building in question did not have a cellar and not only did it not destroy the grave in which the fish was placed, but perhaps even protected it from being disturbed?

In the first few centuries of our era, a large number of objects produced in Roman workshops found their way into the hands of the inhabitants of 'barbarian' Europe, rarely though do any arouse today as much excitement and delight as 'our' glass fish, which saw the light of day once again in 2015. According to the experts, the fish from Czarnówko is the most well-preserved Roman glass vessel of this kind in the world. Its discovery was widely reported in the media – in the press, on television and online. The fish is yet another sensational artefact to enrich the archaeological collection of the Museum in Lębork – let us not forget the now-famous Roman copper-alloy cauldron with Suebian heads, which was recovered during the excavation of the cemetery in Czarnówko in 2000.

In the following chapters, we will tell you about this extraordinary grave discovered in Czarnówko, about the Roman glass vessels found in the lands of Poland as it is today, and other Roman glass vessels in the shape of animals, we will present other ancient images of fish from Central Europe, as well as examples of such images from the Roman world and the early Middle Ages. We will mention the role of fish in Roman cuisine (with the famous 'garum' sauce – in his letter to Lucilius Seneca the Younger described it as 'an expensive bloody mass of decayed fish' – at the forefront) and the figure of this creature in contemporary culture, together with some nostalgic reminiscence of the glass fish that were, once upon a time, proudly on display on the top of old-fashioned TV sets.