Seal of Nikephoros, the Metropolitan πάσης Ῥωσίας, from Byzantine Cherson

Abstract

This research republishes an interesting sigillographic find from Byzantine Cherson (Shumen, 2011), which first attribution was tentative, suggesting subsequent clarifications and corrections. Oleksandr Alf’orov has provided a new reading of the place-name on the seal reverse, thus indicating the necessity of setting aside the initial attribution of the seal to one of the bishoprics in Bulgaria and allowing one to relate the find from Cherson with the metropolis of Rus’. Now the obverse legend has been successfully reconstructed, uncovering that the seal certainly shows not the traditional image of St. Nikephoros, but rather that of the homonymous saint, the glorified patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century. The image of St. Nikephoros is among the rarest pieces of Byzantine sigillography, though the image of St. Patriarch Nikephoros of Constantinople does not meet with any analogies. The chronology of the seal depends on the specific script and abbreviations in the legend, typical of the period from the twelfth to fourteenth century. Taking stylistic and epigraphic features of the find from Cherson and the term πάσης Ῥωσίας (“of all Rus’) used in the legend into account, there are reasons to consider that, among two metropolitans of Kiev bearing the same name in the twelfth century, the owner of the seal in question was Nikephoros (Nikifor) II who headed the Rus’ian Orthodox church in the late twelfth and the very early thirteenth centuries. The new attribution of this seal clarifies the list of church figures who received letters from Byzantine Cherson in the Late Byzantine period and uncovers this seal’s role of a source valuable and important for the history of the region, which testifies to the existence of inter-church connections between Cherson and Rus’ at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth century.