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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Jewellery & Gems / Byzantine 22K Gold Ring, Greek | Naming GEORGE, Church Facade
Eastern Mediterranean, Byzantine Empire. A substantial gold finger ring whose broad shield-shaped bezel carries a Greek legend beneath a domed building rendered in fine incised line. The upper register reads GEORGE, with a second line of letters below that resists confident reading; beneath them sits an arcaded, dome-crowned structure, almost certainly a church facade. Flanking the bezel, the shoulders flare into ribbed, granulated terminals and small beaded bosses, the whole raised in high-purity gold of roughly 91.7 percent fineness. Such personal signets served both as marks of identity, pressed into wax to seal documents, and as portable declarations of faith. The name may record the wearer, or may invoke Saint George and his dedicated church; the two readings are not mutually exclusive in Byzantine devotional practice. Byzantine inscribed rings blur the line between administrative tool and amulet. From the sixth century onward, monograms, names, and invocations (often KYRIE BOHTHEI, "Lord, help...") were cut into gold bezels so that the wearer's identity and his intercessor were carried on the same hand. Saint George, martyred under Diocletian and venerated across the empire as a soldier-saint, was among the most widely invoked of these protectors, and churches bearing his name proliferated from Cappadocia to the Balkans. The schematic dome-and-arcade device on this bezel belongs to a broader Byzantine visual shorthand in which a single domed silhouette stood for the church as institution and as sanctuary, a motif equally at home on lead seals, pilgrim tokens, and reliquary lids. Item # 205229
Estimate:£904.75
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorJewellery & Gems
Estimate:
£904.75
RING 18K VITGULD MED 1 ODLAD PÄRLA OCH 3 BRILJANTER.
09/29/2026
£225.96
Est: £302.98
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