The Gold of the Avars

The bus winds its way round the conier before it reaches the bridge pier, arriving at its Baross tér terminal. Trotting with the swann towards the subway most of fail to notice – it's been there for ages, after all – the weird sculpture half way. Like a peculiar totem pole, the sizeably inflated drinking vessel with a bull's head commands the square. Many thousands stream past it in the modern-time bustle and hustle, paying scant attention to it. No time to stop, no time to muse. To muse, for example, about the whys and the wherefores of creating a sculpture from the ornate vessel which is characterised by both nomadic impetuosity and mature subtlety.

The is a more conscious and intimate way to meet the well-Ioved chimera. We make a pilgrimage to Vienna for it. Leaving sarcastic Brueghel, mysterious Vermeer, the Renaissance Italian masters and ancient Egyptian treasures behind, in a glass-protected niche we come across the figured golden vessels of a bygone world, to summon up our lost mythology.

A princely set indeed. Belligerent griffins, human-faced quadrupeds, a ferociously triumphant equestrian, a flame-haired bowman, a lion-bodied bull – hunting, ascending to the heavens. Images and motifs from a world when the natural and the supernatural intermingled in people's minds and the boundaries between myth and reality were blurred.

Twenty-three pure gold vessels: a supreme treasure, unearthed 203 years ago in Nagyszentmiklós (today: Sînnicolau Mare) after centuries of interment. Their subsequent story was an adventurous one. Found by a Bánát viticulturist, the treasure changed hands often, and it was passed on from na'íve or profiteering merchants to a responsible clerk, who deposited the collection in a safe place. János Boráros was his name, a Pest magistrate. The vessel-sculpture standing in the square named after him commemorates his efforts to rescue the gold find.

To say that something is 'peerless' is not necessarily a rhetorical or exaggerated statement. Certainly not in connection with this treasure. It is the product of a conspiracy of timelessness-radiating metal and mortal human hands to craft beauty, perfection, and everlasting value. On the other hand, to say it is 'peerless' also betrays an ignorance about its origins. Who the vessels' creators, users, and generations of owners were, are questions yet to be answered. Then, too, we want to know who buried the treasure – to safeguard it from historical turmoil – but had not the chance to unbury it.

There are two courses open to us in the attempt to comprehend the treasure's bygone world. The first is a scientific/scholarly one, the second emotional. The quest for certitude – if indeed such thing as certitude can be established from such a distant perspective – is the domain of science. And science is meticulously doing its best, ever applying the latest technologies, drawing analogies, and weighing up arguments. Very probably all we shall ever have is the experience of beauty the Nagyszentmiklós treasure treasure affords. As well as the unalterable bond with the treasure which the past two centuries have created in the spirit of national renewal – the works of the poet János Arany, the scholar and cleric Arnold Ipolyi, the painter Bertalan Székely, and many other great Hungarian artists.

Once more, the gold of Nagyszentmiklós has set foot on Hungarian soil. Four generations – 118 years – ago the treasure was exhibited in Budapest. Now it has come within touching distance again, in the nation's two hundred-year-old museum which was brought into being at the instigation of Ferenc Széchényi. The very raison d'étre of this museum is to give Hungary's historical, archaeological, and artistic heritage a dignity that is long overdue.

Most treasure-related questions are still awaiting to be answered. Some of its secrets may remain secrets for ever. Even the three types of inscription – in Greek, Turkic, and an unidetitified tongue – written in Greek and runiform letters do not seem to hold too many clues. However, there is very much more to the wonderful gold treasure than solely its material and archaeological values: it is a collection of artistic masterpieces in its own right. It is unique and peerless. It is part of our consciousness and our stimulating world. We are aware that in it abides 'a certain colossal, ancient moral'.

(From the Greetings of Zoltán Rockenbauer, Minister of Cultural Heritage)