Folia archeologica 22.

Zsuzsa S. Lovag: Byzantine Type Reliquary Pectoral Crosses in the Hungarian National Museum

RELIQUARY PECTORAL CROSSES 163 As the Kiev crosses were not separated from the other ones of Byzantine type up to the present, their way to Hungary could not be discussed either. M. BárányOberschall deals with them as Group II of the Byzantine reliquary crosses and attributes their occurrence to the connections between Hungary and Byzantium, gaining ground from the middle of the twelfth century and culminating in the times of Béla III.

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7 1 laving established their Russian origin, their way to Hungary is to be attributed also to other factors, namely to the Russian-Hungarian connections. Besides the well-known dynastic connections between the Hungarian kings and the rulers of Kiev and Galicia, the activity of Russian monks in Hungary (cf. the Basilite monasteries of Tihany and Visegrád) is also known. The toponyms with compounds "Orosz" and "Oroszi" point to the fact of Russian settlements from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on.

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8 The early crosses might have come here with the early Russian settlers or with the Kiev refugees. The Hungarian National Museum crosses of provenances mainly unknown allow historical conclusions only within the limits of probability. A comprehensive collection of materials among the crosses found in Europe may allow a more exact dating of the Holy Land type crosses and perhaps an identification of local variants. The collecting of the pectoral crosses preserved in Hungary and the charting of those with a doubtless provenance may yield a clue for their way to Hungary and for their spreading.

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7 Bárátiy-Oberschall, Ai., op. cit. 232. 5

8 The first data documented regarding Oroszvár is from the year 1208, but historians bring Nagyoroszi, County Nógrád, in connection with Russians invited and settled by King Colman. - Ale/icb, J., MNy 5 (1909) 338. 6

a We should like to express our gratitude here to Éva Kovács, for her valuable help, and Péter Király for reading and identifying the inscriptions on the crosses, further to Csaba Gabler and János Molnár for the good photographs.