Charred medieval loaves stamped with crosses survived a 14th-century fire in a Novgorod church

Three small charred loaves, each about 4.5 centimeters across, have been described from a sealed fire deposit under a spiral staircase in Veliky Novgorod’s Church of the Dormition at the Marketplace. Two of them still carry the imprint of an eight-pointed cross, and the archaeologists say the bread survived a fire at the end of the 14th century. The study comes from Ivan Antipov and Anastasia Trushnikova of St. Petersburg State University, who published it in the September 2026 issue of a Russian medieval-studies journal.

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Three loaves under a staircase

The bread came out of the university’s 2021 to 2023 excavation seasons, according to the account Arkeonews published on Oct. 15. It lay on the lower steps of a spiral staircase in the northwestern corner of the church, in a stone building whose first phase dates to 1135 to 1144. Each loaf weighs between 3.64 and 6.77 grams and stands no more than 1.7 centimeters high. Chemical analysis at the State Hermitage Museum found starch traces that support a flour-based identification.

The staircase deposit held more than bread. Bronze lamp fragments, a book clasp, coins, grain, nutshells and traces of beeswax came out of the same space, which the authors suggest may have worked partly as a storage area or sacristy. Grain and nutshells sitting beside lamps and a book clasp give the fire layer the look of a working church interior caught mid-use, rather than a ritual deposit set down on purpose, although the authors do not claim to know how the bread came to be there.

Which fire, and how sure is the date

The authors argue that the loaves were sealed by a fire at the end of the 14th century, and the abstract in the journal Drevnyaya Rus says the same thing in the same terms. The narrower year is less settled. Two medieval coins found in different fire layers, construction evidence and chronicle entries lead the team to say the lower layer may correspond to a devastating fire recorded in 1385, and another fire probably occurred in 1399. That hedging matters: the 1385 date is an inference about the layer, not a direct date measured on the bread itself.

The church has a long record of damage and repair. A community encyclopedia entry on the church says Bishop Niphont laid the first stone in 1135 and that the building was completed in 1144, then lists fire-driven restructuring in 1541, 1606 and 1745 and a rebuilding in 1458 in which the old stone was crushed. Only the original plan survived those campaigns, which is one reason a deposit sealed in the late 14th century, before most of that work, is valuable to the archaeologists who study the building.

Eight-pointed crosses and the stamps that made them

The best-preserved loaf shows an eight-pointed cross with plant-like extensions inside a circular border, while the third loaf is too damaged to show any design. The researchers first compared the objects with carbonized bread from Pompeii, then identified them as prosphora, the bread used in the Eastern Christian Eucharist. According to the published paper, they set the loaves beside twelve wooden stamps recovered earlier in Novgorod, and seven of those stamps show variations of the same flourished cross.

The authors conclude from that match that Novgorod had a local tradition of decorating liturgical bread with a flourished cross. Their abstract also reads the evidence as pointing to two stamp formats, round and rectangular, in different sizes, and ties that to Byzantine written sources that prescribe how the preparatory rite of the liturgy is performed. Later Russian bread seals from other centers mostly show the Golgotha cross with the instruments of the Passion, so the Novgorod design belongs to an earlier and more local habit. The comparison also gives the study its reach beyond one church: if the stamps and the loaves agree, as the authors argue, then the carved wood dug up in earlier seasons can be read as tools that actually pressed bread, and the cross on the best-preserved loaf, with its plant-like extensions inside a circular border, becomes a measured example of the pattern rather than a lone curiosity.

A find with no close parallel

Antipov and Trushnikova say they know of no comparable archaeological discoveries of actual prosphora from medieval Rus’. Wooden stamps have turned up in Novgorod for decades, but a loaf is another kind of evidence.

Photographs and details of the church’s setting are collected in a Russian gallery page for the Church of the Dormition at the Marketplace, which gives the same 1135 to 1144 construction span and notes the building’s alternate name. The full paper, including its description of the finds and the comparison with the Novgorod stamps, is the primary record for anyone who wants the detail behind the news summary.

The loaves ask a question that the paper itself leaves open: why bread prepared for the altar ended up on a staircase. The authors offer the storage or sacristy idea as a possibility rather than a finding, and the coins, lamps and beeswax around it point to a working church interior rather than a sealed cache. The fire preserved what the congregation had set aside, and the paper in Drevnyaya Rus is where the argument for reading it that way now sits, for other Novgorod specialists to test against their own stamps and layers. The Arkeonews report carries the figures quoted here.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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