A lead seal about 1,400 years old, stamped with the name STEPHANVS and the abbreviation EPISC for bishop, has been found on Lukovac, an uninhabited rocky islet in the northern Rab archipelago of Croatia. The disc measures roughly 22 by 19 millimetres, close to the size of a one-euro coin.
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Its finders think it may be one of the oldest bishop’s seals from the eastern Adriatic. They cannot yet say which Stefan it belonged to, or which diocese he served. The dig belongs to the Archaeological Topography of Rab Island project, which the Polish Press Agency says has run since 2019 and is funded under the Re:Set project of the Croatian Science Foundation.
A 22-millimetre bulla stamped STEPHANVS EPISC
The object is a bulla, a lead disc once threaded on a cord and clamped with sealing pliers to close a letter or parcel. HeritageDaily, drawing on the Polish Press Agency, describes a wreath and four-petalled rosettes around the lettering, with the name on one face across three lines and the episcopal title on the other. Prof. Fabian Welc of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, who leads the Polish side of the project, said a parcel closed that way could not be opened without leaving a trace, and described this kind of documentary seal as one that closed an official letter or legal act and confirmed the sender’s identity.
The team dates the seal provisionally to the 6th or 7th century, using its form, the inscription, comparisons with other seals and the dating of the layer in which it lay, according to the Nauka w Polsce report on the find.
Why Latin on a Byzantine-era seal matters
Byzantine seals are usually inscribed in Greek, so a Latin legend stands out. Latin was used at the western edges of the Byzantine world, especially in Italy, where similar clerical seals from the 6th and 7th centuries exist. The researchers found no parallel for this bulla from the eastern Adriatic in the literature they reviewed, and that gap is the basis for calling it possibly among the oldest episcopal seals in the region rather than certainly so.
Welc made a point about context. Seals of this kind are known from collections, and scholars know what is written on them, but they seldom know where and in what circumstances they were found. This one comes with a site and a specific layer, which is what lets the team test its age instead of inferring it from style.
Dr Ana Konestra of the Institute of Archaeology in Zagreb, who leads the Croatian side, called the find “a trace of early medieval church administration,” in the words carried by dzieje.pl.
The islet, its church and the missing bishop
Lukovac was far from empty in late antiquity. A 2024 paper in Saeculum Christianum, co-authored by Welc and Konestra, reports masonry buildings covering almost the whole islet, a wall reinforced with buttresses and a single-nave church with a semicircular apse. The authors suggest a fortified refuge that may also have supported Byzantine troops. An earlier project summary from the University of Warsaw’s risk-analysis centre adds Egyptian porphyry tile fragments, a cistern and seventh-century amphorae from Byzantine Egypt. Konestra has described the island as a religious centre and refuge for the surrounding population.
The same summary describes an 11.5 by 5.2 metre cistern, more than two metres deep, that held late antique refuse including a bronze belt buckle from the 7th century. Prof. Renata Stachowicz-Rybka of the Polish Academy of Sciences found charred wheat, spelt, rye, broad beans, peas, lentils and grape seeds in the samples. Few weeds or chaff turned up, which suggests grain was threshed and cleaned elsewhere before being carried to the islet.
Coarse pottery from the 6th to 8th centuries resembles wares from northern and eastern Italy, and the researchers see the site as part of a trade and military network probably under Byzantine control via the Ravenna Exarchate. That church and its imported goods make a bishop’s seal less surprising. They do not say who Stefan was, and the sources are careful on this point. No bishop of that name is attested in the written record for the region in this period.
One hypothesis links him to the diocese of Rab, whose bishop list jumps from Titianus in the 6th century to Peter in 986. Osor and Krk remain possible, and the researchers stress the Rab link is only a hypothesis. The seal’s findspot alone does not show where the document was sent from or who received it, and the letter it once closed is gone. Because the Rab list has a gap of several hundred years, a Stefan from the Lukovac period would fill a hole in the record, but the sources treat that idea strictly as a hypothesis. Whether he can be placed in any episcopal list is the question the team has not answered, and the content of the document the seal once closed is unknown, so the lead disc remains the only trace of that exchange.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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