A 1,400-Year-Old Lead Seal Found on a Deserted Croatian Islet Names “Stefan, Bishop”, a Man History Forgot

On a small, uninhabited rocky islet in Croatia’s Rab archipelago, archaeologists found a lead seal about the size of a one-euro coin. One side reads STEPHANVS and the other reads EPISC, short for episcopus, so together they say “Stefan, bishop.” The trouble is that no bishop of that name shows up in any surviving record from the region for this period. The team calls the seal potentially one of the oldest bishop’s seals known from the eastern Adriatic.

Where the seal turned up

The find comes from the islet of Lukovac. Polish and Croatian archaeologists have investigated the site together since 2019. Under the research, the islet turned out to hold a fortified settlement from roughly the 6th to the 8th centuries, with an early Christian church and a water cistern. The team also found Egyptian porphyry tiles, 7th-century bronze belt buckles, and amphorae from Byzantine Egypt, which point to Mediterranean connections.

What the seal looks like

The object is a lead bulla that measures 22 by 19 millimeters. STEPHANVS runs across three lines on one face, and EPISC appears on the other. A wreath surrounds the inscriptions, with four-petalled rosettes above and below the name.

The team dates it provisionally to the 6th or 7th century AD, based on the seal’s form, lettering, comparable examples, and the archaeological layer where it lay.

What a seal like this did

People used seals like this to close and authenticate documents. A cord went through a channel in the disc, and the lead was clamped shut around it. That locked an official letter or package so nobody could open it without leaving a trace, and it showed who sent it. Prof. Fabian Welc of Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw, who leads the Polish side, notes how valuable it is to know the seal’s exact archaeological context. Dr Ana Konestra, the Croatian co-director, calls the find “a trace of early medieval church administration.”

The bishop nobody remembers

No surviving regional source mentions a bishop named Stefan for this period. The known list of bishops of Rab has a long gap. Titianus is documented in the 6th century, and the next known bishop, Peter I, does not appear until AD 986. Stefan might fill part of that gap, but the team treats the link as hypothetical. He could also have served in Osor or Krk in the northern Adriatic. The article stresses that there is no demonstrated link between the seal and a pope.

Italian bishops’ and clergy’s seals from the 6th and 7th centuries offer comparisons, but the team has found no direct equivalent in the eastern Adriatic yet.

What remains uncertain

The dating is provisional and the Rab identification is hypothetical. The team does not have enough evidence to say who Stefan was, where he lived, or what the lost document said. The settlement may have housed ecclesiastical, military, or secular elites, and that too is only a possibility. This post relies on a report of the Polish Press Agency (PAP) as carried by HeritageDaily, and we found no journal paper.

Sources: Polish Press Agency (PAP) report with Prof. Fabian Welc and Dr Ana Konestra, as reported by HeritageDaily (1 November 2026). Image credit: Fabian Welc.