The Barbarians Who Brought Gold to Poland

On 5 October 1882, Adolf Lauschke was draining a wet field near the village then known as Vettersfelde when his work produced something considerably more interesting than water. From the dark soil emerged gold.

Not a coin or a lost piece of jewellery, but an extraordinary collection of objects whose combined weight approached five kilograms. There were fittings belonging to weapons, a short Scythian sword known as an akinakes, decorative plaques and, most spectacularly, a large golden fish covered with tiny images of animals attacking and devouring one another. It was exotic, technically sophisticated and unmistakably foreign to the world in which it had been found.

Today the place is called Witaszkowo, a village near Gubin in western Poland. In the sixth century BC there was no Poland, no Germany and certainly no international border running nearby. There were forests, rivers, trading routes and communities belonging to the cultural world archaeologists call the Lusatian culture.

And somewhere among them appeared gold connected to one of antiquity's most formidable peoples.

The Scythians had arrived.

The question that has troubled archaeologists ever since is what they were doing so far from home — and why they left behind a fortune.

Riders from another world

The Scythians were not a nation in the modern sense. They belonged to a broad cultural world of predominantly nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples that spread across the Eurasian steppe during the first millennium BC. Archaeology and modern genetic research place important elements of their early development deep in Central Asia before Scythian groups expanded westwards and became dominant across the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea.

Their civilisation was built around something that transformed ancient warfare: the horse.

A Scythian warrior could ride enormous distances, live with his herds and attack with the composite bow before an enemy accustomed to fighting on foot could effectively respond. When the Persian king Darius I invaded Scythian territory around 513 BC with one of the most powerful armies on Earth, the Scythians largely refused to give him the decisive battle he wanted. They withdrew, harassed his forces and stretched Persian logistics until Darius eventually abandoned the campaign.

To settled societies watching them emerge from the steppe, they must have seemed almost impossible to pin down.

They also developed a reputation for terrifying violence.

Much of what we know about that reputation comes from the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC. His Scythians were magnificent horsemen, elusive warriors and people whose customs could be shocking even by the fairly accommodating standards of the ancient world.

According to Herodotus, a Scythian warrior drank the blood of the first enemy he killed. He then removed the heads of slain enemies and presented them as proof of his kills, because participation in the division of booty depended on it. Scalps were cleaned and hung from horses as trophies; the most successful warriors accumulated the most. Some, Herodotus claimed, stitched scalps together into garments.

The treatment of particularly hated enemies was even more macabre. Their skulls could be cleaned, covered externally with leather and converted into drinking vessels. A wealthy Scythian might even line the inside with gold. When important guests arrived, Herodotus says, the host could bring out such a cup and explain who its former owner had been and how he had defeated him.

For centuries, historians had good reason to wonder how much of this was observation and how much was a Greek author making distant barbarians sound suitably barbaric.

Then archaeology began catching up with Herodotus.

Unfortunately for the Scythians' reputation, Herodotus may have been right

In 2023, researchers examined leather from Scythian burials in Ukraine using palaeoproteomics — essentially identifying ancient materials through preserved proteins.

Most of the leather was unsurprising: sheep, goats, cattle and horses.

Two samples were not.

They were human.

Both came from Scythian quivers. The discovery provided the first strong direct scientific evidence supporting one of Herodotus's most gruesome claims: that Scythians sometimes used the skin of defeated enemies in the equipment that carried their arrows.

Other archaeological discoveries have given uncomfortable support to his descriptions of funerary violence. At the great Aleksandropol royal burial mound in Ukraine, archaeologists found eleven accompanying burials of men, women and children who appear to have been killed as part of the funeral ceremonies. At Chortomlyk, severed finger bones correspond eerily with Herodotus's description of Scythian mourners mutilating themselves during royal funerals.

This does not mean every colourful sentence Herodotus wrote should suddenly be treated as courtroom evidence. Nor should the Scythians be reduced to blood-drinking psychopaths. Greek writers had their own ideas about civilisation and barbarism, and Scythian society was considerably richer than its battlefield rituals.

They traded. They negotiated. They produced and commissioned extraordinary art. They maintained connections stretching across thousands of kilometres. Their elite surrounded themselves with some of the most beautiful goldwork produced anywhere in the ancient world.

And this brings us back to that wet field in Witaszkowo.

The fish

The most famous object found there is difficult to forget.

It is a large gold ornament shaped like a fish, approximately 41 centimetres long and weighing more than half a kilogram. Across its body is an entire miniature world of predators and prey: feline beasts, deer, boar and other animals arranged in the dynamic animal style associated with Scythian elite culture. Its form combines steppe imagery with influences from the Greek and Danubian worlds.

The object illustrates something easily lost when the Scythians are described simply as nomads.

Their world was remarkably international.

Greek colonies dotted the Black Sea coast. Scythian elites traded and interacted with Greek communities and commissioned luxury objects from highly skilled craftsmen. Artistic motifs travelled between the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Black Sea and the Eurasian steppe. The Witaszkowo objects themselves appear to embody this mixture of cultures.

Gold was particularly suited to such a society. It was portable, incorruptible, conspicuous and universally valuable. A ruler whose political world stretched across vast distances could carry enormous wealth without needing a palace or treasury in which to store it.

A horse, weapons and gold could travel together.

Which makes the location of the Witaszkowo treasure even more intriguing.

From the Scythian heartlands north of the Black Sea, somebody had carried these extraordinary objects hundreds of kilometres westward into Central Europe.

For a long time, archaeologists thought they knew why.

The obvious answer was war

Scythian arrowheads and traces of destruction have been found across parts of Central Europe. Communities of the Lusatian culture fortified settlements during the period when Scythian groups were expanding westward. The image of mounted raiders arriving from the east therefore fitted comfortably with the evidence.

The Witaszkowo treasure seemed to fit the same story.

Perhaps a Scythian prince had led a raiding party into the region. Perhaps the local inhabitants fought back. The foreign chieftain was killed, and his magnificent equipment ended up buried with him or captured as war booty.

It was a compelling explanation, particularly when combined with everything Herodotus had told us about the people who owned such weapons.

There was only one problem.

Archaeologists couldn't find the grave.

In fact, for more than a century they couldn't even establish precisely where the treasure had originally been found.

The field had swallowed its secret again.

Finding the field

After the Second World War, Witaszkowo became part of Poland while most of the treasure remained in Berlin's Antikensammlung. Polish archaeologists repeatedly tried to relocate the original nineteenth-century discovery site, without success.

Between 2001 and 2004, a Polish-German research project returned to the problem. Researchers combined old Berlin museum documentation with systematic fieldwork around Witaszkowo and neighbouring Kozów.

Eventually they identified the field.

What they found there changed the story.

This did not look like the forgotten grave of a Scythian warlord.

Near the treasure's original location was a carefully constructed ceremonial spring lined with stones. Archaeologists recovered hundreds of polished bowls with raised centres resembling Greek ritual vessels used for libations — ceremonies in which valuable liquids were poured out as offerings to deities. There were unusual glass beads probably originating in the Black Sea steppe region, stone paving, traces of burning and the remains of a wooden walkway leading from a large hearth towards the spring.

Then the gold itself provided another clue.

Metallographic examination indicated that the precious objects showed no signs of having been used, but did show traces of fire.

A very different scene began to emerge.

Perhaps nobody had lost the treasure.

Perhaps nobody had hidden it.

Perhaps it had been put there deliberately.

A gift worth five kilograms of gold

The researchers proposed that the site was connected with the worship of water deities and that valuable objects were intentionally deposited there during ritual activity. In that interpretation, the Witaszkowo treasure may originally have been a diplomatic gift from Scythians to local leaders, subsequently sacrificed at the sanctuary.

It is an extraordinary possibility.

Imagine the encounter sometime in the sixth century BC. From the east arrive mounted warriors whose reputation already travels ahead of them. Their bows, horses and methods of war are unlike those of the communities farther west. Their world stretches towards the Black Sea and beyond.

They could attack.

Instead, someone brings gold.

The objects themselves are not cheap trinkets offered to impress provincial strangers. They are elite pieces associated with weapons and status, fashioned within the sophisticated artistic networks connecting the Scythian world with Greek craftsmen and neighbouring cultures.

If the diplomatic interpretation is correct, the treasure tells us something important about how the Scythians expanded their influence.

The people who drank from the skulls of enemies also understood negotiation.

They knew that controlling distant routes did not always require destroying everyone who lived along them. Sometimes intimidation worked. Sometimes warfare worked.

And sometimes five kilograms of gold worked better.

What were they buying?

This is where Witaszkowo retains its mystery.

A diplomatic gift only makes sense if the relationship was valuable.

The region lay far beyond the main Scythian centres, but Central Europe contained resources, communities and routes worth controlling or accessing. Long-distance exchange networks moved amber, metals, luxury objects and people across enormous distances during the Iron Age.

Recent scholarship has gone further in challenging the old image of Scythian expansion as simply a sequence of destructive raids. The archaeological picture can also accommodate trade, political relationships, settlement, exploitation and interaction with local elites.

And we now know that Scythian cultural presence in the territory of modern Poland was not limited to a single mysterious treasure.

At Chotyniec in southeastern Poland, archaeologists uncovered a large fortified settlement covering roughly 40 hectares, with enormous defensive earthworks and material associated with the Scythian cultural sphere. Radiocarbon evidence places activity there broadly between the eighth and fifth centuries BC. Researchers remain cautious about whether its inhabitants should all literally be called Scythians, but the site demonstrates a far deeper Scythian-world presence north of the Carpathians than the old picture of occasional raiding parties suggested.

The gold at Witaszkowo may therefore be one glittering fragment of a much larger story that archaeology is only beginning to reconstruct.

Gold, blood and diplomacy

There is an irresistible contradiction in the Scythians.

The same culture that produced some of antiquity's most exquisite gold objects celebrated a warrior's ability to kill. Herodotus describes men displaying enemy scalps as markers of status, drinking from modified skulls and excluding warriors who had never killed an enemy from an annual ceremonial drinking ritual. Modern archaeology has shown that at least some of the details once dismissed as Greek horror stories were grounded in real practices.

Yet brutality was only one language of power.

Gold was another.

For a mobile elite, a magnificent golden object was more than wealth. It communicated rank, allegiance and access to distant networks. It could adorn a weapon, reward loyalty, impress a rival, seal a relationship or be surrendered to the gods.

At Witaszkowo, those two faces of Scythian power meet in an unusually beautiful way.

The gold objects include weapons and imagery dominated by predators. But the archaeological context increasingly suggests that they were not dropped during battle. They may have arrived through negotiation and ended their journey in ritual.

The warriors had brought their gold into somebody else's country.

Someone there considered it valuable enough to give away twice: first between humans, and then from humans to the gods.

Then the treasure travelled again

The irony is that Witaszkowo's gold did not remain where it had rested for roughly two and a half millennia.

After its accidental discovery in 1882, the collection entered the German museum world. Most of the surviving treasure is today held by the Antikensammlung in Berlin, while the field in which it was found lies inside modern Poland.

Its geography has therefore changed repeatedly without the gold itself needing to change at all.

It may have been created by craftsmen connected with the Greek and Black Sea worlds for a Scythian elite. It travelled into Central Europe. It was deposited near a ceremonial spring. A farmer rediscovered it in nineteenth-century Prussia. Borders moved around it. Archaeologists from Poland and Germany eventually reconstructed its original context more than a century later.

And still we cannot name the person who brought it there.

We do not know who received it.

We do not know precisely what was agreed.

We cannot know what words were spoken before objects of astonishing value were surrendered at the water's edge.

What we have is the gold.

And, unusually for an ancient mystery, the more archaeology has discovered about it, the stranger its story has become.

The treasure of Witaszkowo was once thought to be evidence that a Scythian warrior came to this corner of Europe and died.

Today, a more intriguing possibility has emerged.

Perhaps he came here to do business.

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