Loaves of bread from the Seventh-Eighth centuries stamped with Christian imagery have been found on the historic website of Eirenopolis, modern-day Topraktepe, Turkey. They’re among the many best-preserved archaeological examples of bread ever present in Anatolia.
The 5 loaves have been discovered carbonized, which preserved them in such situation the iconography stamped on them remains to be clearly legible. Probably the most elaborately adorned loaf is stamped with the picture of Christ because the sower who crops wheat for harvest. An inscription in Greek across the border interprets to “With gratitude to Blessed Jesus,” a reference to John 6:35: And Jesus mentioned to them, “I’m the bread of life. He who involves Me shall by no means starvation, and he who believes in Me shall by no means thirst.”
The opposite 4 are all stamped with Maltese crosses. They’re round, and the stamped markings point out they have been prosphora, easy, small loaves of leavened bread Greek Orthodox Eucharistic rituals, both because the bread consecrated because the literal Physique of Christ shared throughout Communion, or because the antidoron, blessed bread distributed after the service. Imprinted bread remains to be used at present because the prosphora and antidoron.
The Topraktepe discovery transcends the worth of the person artifact and extends to the historic understanding of the Ermenek area throughout Late Antiquity and the early medieval interval. The presence of a manufacturing heart for ritual objects of this high quality and with such particular iconography suggests the existence in Irenopolis of an energetic Christian neighborhood, endowed with assets and a definite theological identification expressed by means of these representations that diverged from imperial canons.
The loaves will endure archaeobotanical research to find out the precise composition of the grains used of their preparation, in addition to microscopy and tomography methods to higher perceive the manufacturing and carbonization processes. Every of those information factors will assist reconstruct extra exactly the ritual, day by day life, agriculture, and beliefs of a neighborhood that, greater than 13 hundred years in the past, baked its religion into bread—and that, by a quirk of archaeological preservation, has reached us at present to inform its story.
