Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 27. (Budapest, 2009)
Katalin E. NAGY - Ádám BÍRÓ - Ádám BOLLÓK - László KÖLTŐ Péter LANGÓ - Attila Antal TÜRK: Byzantine Silk Fragments from a Tenth-century Grave at Fonyód
out from a garment once produced at a silkmanufacturing centre and applied as parts to a garment assembled in the Carpathian Basin, but this hypothesis does not stand up to scrutiny. It is easier to imagine that the garment of the buried young man was once made in a centre of the Mediterranean and perhaps later slightly modified. 3) Belt mount and/or dress mount I Another intriguing feature of the Fonyód silk (no. 1) is the regular hole (figs 4. 3-4). During restoration we found that it was not the outcome of a post-depositional process. There are two hypotheses about the use of the hole: it was either used to fasten the object applied to the garment during its use, or it held in place some object applied to the dress for the funeral. The object in question pierced the silk piece at two points (so there are two holes). During the smoothing-out of the crumpled silk fragments - as mentioned above - the two holes were found superimposed, which indicate that the textile was folded before the object was fastened to it to achieve a firmer support with the thickness of the cloth. What kind of an object must have been fastened in this manner? From the fact that the hole did not only shift the filaments from one another but also caused loss of material, one tends to infer that it was not a sewn hole (it was not created by leading the needle through the cloth). The hole was either made by a puncher or a rivet. The only object in the Fonyód grave that would require this kind of fastening is the set of cast silver-based alloy (belt) mounts. Another clue may be that two belt mount-shaped objects were recovered during the restoration under the vertebrae when the textiles were being smoothed out. It is not easy to explain why only the two discovered holes can be found in the restored pieces. Taking the position of the two holes in the textile, one might rightfully presume that since the holes are at the border of the extant piece, the holes made by the other two rivets of the mount were in the perished part of the garment. It is another question that no similar regular holes are found in the silk cloth between the holes and the insert. At any rate, the phenomenon might be attributed to the extreme fragmentariness of the cloth and to the fact that in the height of the holes there are imprints of three large lost patches. That the holes are the only ones must warn researchers to be cautious with interpretations. (It further compounds the question that from the same earth ball not only the studied intact (belt)mount but another fragmentary item without its brokenoff parts was also recovered!) It is also possible that if the garment was made in the Mediterranean, the holes might also have been created there - but there is no proof whatsoever. This is refuted by the fact that despite the crumpled state of the textile the holes were found superimposed on one another, that is, when the cloth was put into the grave, the object was on the garment and it only became displaced during decomposition or some overlooked post-depositional process. If among the above-outlined interpretations the most feasible one can be proved, it would mean that the objects called so far (belt)mounts cast from a silver-based alloy were not worn fastened to leather but as dress mounts fastened to the silk cloth. Should this hypothesis be verified, it would be necessary to re-examine each case of research in which there were objects identified as belt mount to see if they were really used on belts. Since the belt reconstruction published by István Dienes in 1956 and 1959 2' 29
