Conservation around the Millennium (Hungarian National Museum, 2001)
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showing dark blackish lilac and white layers or blackish lilac and turquoise blue upper layers.24 A strongly worn stone survived in the centre of one of the sides, which is the remnant of amber. The colourful helmet could be rather striking in its own time as well. Géza Nagy25 wrote the followings about the excessive decoration of the helmet. “The shapes, namely (on the band of the helmet - note by K.B.), evidently prove that the entire piece was made in a Roman province, while the gem imitations in settings suggest that the Romans produced it not for themselves but for the Barbarians.”26 The condition of the helmet is obviously determined by the fact that it lay in the basin of the Danube or in the flood plain of the river for centuries. The iron corroded through the whole thickness, the rank corrosion layer cemented together with pebbles. The gilt silver plating got crystallised and became very brittle and exposed to injuries. We do not know what treatments were applied on the object right after its discovery. I find it most probable that Győző Baki restored it the last time at the end of the 1950’s or at the beginning of the 1960’s. Cleaning was followed by conservation with cerezine in vacuum,27 which had its consequences for the present restoration. The gaps were filled in with gypsum, which was painted to a neutral colour, (fig. 7) The filling in itself was very correct, but it has cracked at many places, the paint peeled off and, according to László Kocsis’s recent studies, it is not wholly accurate from an archaeological respect. RESTORATION AND RECONSTRUCTION It was easy to remove the gypsum since it never stuck strongly to the object that had been soaked in wax Regrettably, however, unlike at the sports helmet, we could not remove even partially the cerezine from the material of the helmet because of the condition of the object (fig. 8). Things were made even worse when the inlays and the coating of the helmet were “freshened” in the course of the past decades with applying various materials on the surfaces (cerezine, mixture of floor wax and beeswax, celluloid, oxiline varnish28 and Paraloid were certainly on the list)29. A copy was probably made of it sometime in the recent decades, since we found traces of silicon rubber in the small fissures, under the plating of the helmet and along the inlays. Inside, the helmet contained the imprints of pebbles and the fallen in fragments of the cheek flaps, corrosion soaked with cerezine and celluloid and pebbly loam. We could not completely clear them away even though we have significantly more means than at the time of its discovery. If it were not soaked in wax, dirt could completely be removed mechanically down to the original surface after reinforcing the material. In this waxy state, however, it is not possible to our knowledge. Numerous fissures weakened the material beside the long fissure (we do not know what was originally used to glue it together, but it was filled in with 8. Close helmet after the removal of the gypsum and the primary cleaning 66
