Derzelas

A bronze coin the size of a thumbnail, struck at Odessos in the fourth century BCE, shows a man taking his ease. He lies propped on a dining couch, bare to the waist, with a horn of plenty tucked in the crook of his left arm. He has no thunderbolt and no spear. He looks like a guest at a dinner that has been going on for some time, and he is the oldest picture anyone has of the god the city would later call Darzalas.

Odessos stood where Varna stands now, on the Bulgarian shore of the Black Sea. Greeks from Miletus founded it among Thracian tribes, and for a long while the city’s patron was most likely Apollo, as he was in the other Milesian colonies along that coast. Then, in the centuries after Alexander, another figure moved to the front. The Greeks of Odessos called him simply Theos Megas, the Great God. They did not give him a personal name at all.

By the second century BCE he had the city’s silver. The big four-drachma pieces carry his head on one side: a thick beard, heavy hair, a ribbon tied round it. On the other side he stands full length in a robe that falls to his feet, turned to the left, a flat offering bowl held out in his right hand and the cornucopia cradled in his left. The name of the people of Odessos runs down beside him, and the name of the magistrate who answered for the coinage sits under his feet. Greek cities put their own name next to a god’s image when that god was theirs above all others. Odessos was saying whose city it was.

The personal name arrives later, under Rome. Inscriptions and coins of the first centuries CE call him Theos Megas Darzalas, with Derzalas and the short form Derzis as variants, and the name is Thracian. Around it sits one of the more honest disagreements in the study of the ancient Black Sea. One reading holds that he was a local Thracian power from the start, taken up by the Greek settlers when they arrived, kept in second place behind Apollo, and raised to city god in the Hellenistic period with a Greek title and a Greek look. Another holds that the Great God was Greek, and that only in Roman times, when Thracian influence in the city ran strong, was he joined to a Thracian god named Darzalas. Older suggestions make him a polite way of naming Pluto, or one of the Great Gods of Samothrace, or a deliberate Hellenistic creation in the manner of Sarapis. Nothing older than that fourth-century bronze survives to settle it.

On one point everyone agrees. He belongs to the ground. A god shown reclining on a couch is drawn in the way the Greeks drew the powers of the underworld, and the horn of plenty marks him as the kind of underworld lord who sends things up: grain, fruit, increase. The dead go down to him and the harvest comes back.

No story about him survives. That is the plain fact of the matter. No birth, no parents, no wife, no battle, no descent or return. One scholar has guessed that he rose to the first place in the city after some military emergency in which he was thought to have shown himself and saved it, as happened at Byzantium, and she is careful to call that a guess. Everything that can be said of him comes from metal, baked clay and cut stone.

Those say a fair amount. He had a temple in Odessos, and the council and the assembly elected a warden to look after it. A tomb set up by the city honours a dead man with exactly that title, warden of the Great God Darzalas. In the early second century CE the city went further and gave the god himself the yearly office by which it named its years, so that public decrees were dated by Darzalas alongside the Roman consuls. And every fourth year, which the Greeks counted as every fifth, Odessos held the Darzaleia. Bronze coins struck under the emperor Gordian III set the god’s bearded head face to face with the young emperor’s, and on the other side show a prize crown with the name of the games written on it. It is easy enough to hear the rest: the crowd on the stone seats, the smell of the sea coming up from the harbour, the winner bending his neck for the wreath.

He travelled, too. More than a hundred kilometres inland, in the country between Nicopolis ad Istrum and Marcianopolis, a town councillor named Tourbo paid for a marble plaque addressed to Lord Darzalas as a thank-offering. Its carving matches the coins of the coast: the beard, the long robe, the cornucopia, the bowl tipped over an altar with the fire burning on it. In the same district a cavalryman called Aelius Diogenes set up a relief in fulfilment of a vow. His stone is cut with the rider who appears on hundreds of Thracian monuments, and its dedication is to the god Derzis, who listens. A third stone from the third century CE shows a bearded horseman carrying the horn of plenty, his horse rearing toward an altar while a dog runs down a boar beneath its hooves. Away from the coast, the Great God of the Greek city had climbed into the saddle of the Thracian rider.

What he could do follows from what he was. He held what lies under the earth, so wealth and crops were his to hand out, and the dead were in his keeping. He heard prayers, and the men who carved their thanks believed he had answered. He guarded a city well enough that it put his face on its money for five hundred years.

His limits are the limits of a god tied to one place. Outside Odessos and the country behind it, his name is hardly found. He never shook off the larger gods he resembled, and people who met him went on asking whether he was really Pluto, or Sarapis, or the rider. The last coins that carry his face belong to the third century CE, and after them the pictures stop.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Derzelas?

Derzelas, more often written Darzalas, is the Great God of Odessos, the ancient city on the site of Varna in Bulgaria. He is an underworld god who also gives abundance, and he was the city’s chief god from the Hellenistic period into the third century CE. His personal name is Thracian and appears in the Roman period.

What does Derzelas look like?

Coins and reliefs show Derzelas as a heavily bearded man with a ribbon in his hair, wearing a long robe. He holds a flat offering bowl in his right hand and a cornucopia in his left, often over a burning altar. The earliest coins show him reclining bare-chested on a couch, and some inland reliefs show him on horseback.

Was Derzelas a Greek god or a Thracian god?

The question is not settled. One view is that Derzelas was a local Thracian god adopted by the Greek settlers of Odessos and later given a Greek title and appearance. Another view is that the Great God was Greek and was joined to a Thracian god named Darzalas only in Roman times. No evidence older than the fourth century BCE survives to decide it.

What were the Darzaleia?

The Darzaleia were festival games held at Odessos in honour of Darzalas every fourth year. Coins struck under the emperor Gordian III show a prize crown with the name of the games on it, opposite the god’s head facing the emperor’s.

Are there any myths about Derzelas?

No story about Derzelas survives. He has no recorded parents, wife or adventures. Everything known about him comes from coins, clay figures, temple and tomb inscriptions, and carved stone reliefs from Odessos and the country inland from it.

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