Vitus Cathedral, is similar in shape and has a decorated browband with intertwined loops which are also present on the decorated band of the Nemiya Helmet. Wenceslas, a 10th-century single-piece conical helmet in the Treasury of St. The number of helmets found from that era remains very limited. The Nemiya Helmet has few parallels among the surviving military artefacts of early medieval Eastern and Southeastern Europe. The Nemiya Helmet on the exhibition of the Déri Museum in 2022 with a 10th-century iron helmet from Pécs, Hungary and an 11th-century iron helmet, probably from the Novgorod area Erdélyi called attention to a bone tablet found in Plisnesk in 1940 with a relief showing a warrior in full armour and a conical helmet on his head (dated to the 11th-12th centuries, now in the Lviv Historical Museum). Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv, possibly depicting the military saints Demetrios and Nestor killing a gladiator, dated to around 1062 (today in the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow). An important example is a stone slab from St. Conical helmets were depicted on artworks from the Kievan Rus'. Decorated helmets were rare and expensive objects, owned by members of the military elite. In the 11th century Nemiya belonged to the wider geographic area of the Kievan Rus', and located on the important Dniester trade route, part of the Amber Road between the Baltic and the Black Sea. Mykoła Kozak proposed that given the lack of finds of helmets of this type from the territory of Ukraine, as well as from the former Russian lands in general, Western analogies should be considered like the helmets shown on the Bayeux Tapestry (conventionally called Norman type helmets). Raffaele D'Amato proposed that the helmet itself was a Byzantine work of the highest quality, decorated by a Varangian craftsman on the plate with typical Scandinavian ornamentation and a stylised mask on the front, the latter having parallels on the helmet of Yasenovo. Michael Gorelik considered it a 10th-century work combining two different styles of ornamentation: Hungarian (on the front) and Scandinavian (on the border). David Nicolle argued that its typically European form meant that a Byzantine or even Hungarian origin was likely although he supposed that it was found in a Pecheneg site and received a later Pecheneg/Turkish decoration. He also emphasized the pan-European character of the type, and suggested that the Nemiya Helmet was most plausibly of Central European origin. Kirpichnikov said that having made with extreme artistry, it represented a new phase in the development of conical helmets. Erdélyi regarded the artefact as a fine example of the cross-cultural relations between Normans and Russians or Russians and nomadic peoples.ġ1th-century stone slab from Kyiv depicting warrior saints, their fallen enemy wears a conical helmetĪfter its existence became more widely known, a scholarly debate has emerged about its origin and background.

He interpreted both the interlaced knots and the human mask motifs as symbols of protection, used widely by craftsmen in the early Middle Ages. Įrdélyi accepted Kirpichnikov's tentative dating but claimed that the cultural affiliation of the helmet was impossible to ascertain. In 2022-2023 it was the centrepiece of a temporary exhibition in the Déri Museum about the historical connections between the Vikings and the Carpathian Basin during the early Middle Ages. The helmet was first shown to the public at the Long Night of Museums on 21 June 2014 when a new scientific research project was launched. Later the helmet was discovered in the collection of the Déri Museum in Debrecen, Hungary, and published by István Erdélyi in 1968. He dated the artefact tentatively to the 11th-century, and claimed that its conical shape was typical of European helmets of the time, and its decoration was similar to Slavic ornamental art although unique in its pattern. Apparently lost during the First World War, it was only known from one black and white photograph at the time of its first scientific publication by Soviet archaeologist Anatoly Kirpichnikov in 1962. The find entered the collection of the museum in Kamenets-Podolskiy. At the time the area belonged to the Podolia Governorate of the Russian Empire. The helmet was found in 1892 in Nemiya village near the confluence of the Dniester and the Nemiya river during railway construction works. It is an outstanding example of medieval metalworking, and a testimony of the importance of the Dniester trade route in Southeastern Europe. The Nemiya Helmet is a conical helmet from the 11th century that was discovered near the Dniester river on the territory of present-day Ukraine.

Medieval helmets historical