The Horse Pendant That Might Not Be a Horse

It was called a horse pendant. Archaeologists have used that label for decades, applied it across dozens of similar finds from medieval Russia to the Baltic coast, and nobody particularly questioned it. Then one Latvian archaeologist looked more carefully at the creature’s anatomy and suggested that the pendant depicts something that never existed: a monster from Roman natural history that supposedly combined parts of a lion, a stag, and a donkey, ran faster than any known animal, and could imitate the sound of the human voice.

The broken head of a new example has now been uncovered in Pskov, Russia, and it is bringing the debate back into focus.

What Was Found in Pskov

During the 2026 excavation season at the Olginsky-10 site on Paromenskaya Street in Pskov’s historic Zavelychye district, archaeologists from the Pskov Region Archaeological Center recovered the detached head of a zoomorphic pendant. Most of the object is missing. But the fragment is recognizable enough that specialists could immediately identify it as belonging to a well-documented class of medieval women’s amulets dated primarily to the 11th and first half of the 12th century, with related examples continuing into the 13th and 14th centuries.

Complete versions of this pendant type show a compact four-legged creature with an elongated, oversized head and a tail that curves upward to form the suspension loop from which the pendant hung. They were cast in non-ferrous metal and often decorated with simple geometric patterns. Women wore them on the chest or suspended from a belt, usually alongside other pendants, in arrangements that combined personal ornament with protective function.

From Smolensk to the Baltic

The pendants have a wide geographic distribution. Large numbers have been found in the Smolensk region of Russia, giving them the conventional name of Smolensk-type horse pendants. But the distribution extends considerably further. A major concentration exists along the lower Daugava River in what is now Latvia, in territories associated with the medieval Livs. Research from Latvia has documented dozens of examples, including pieces that appear to have been produced locally rather than imported. Finds have also been recorded across other parts of medieval Rus’ and the eastern Baltic.

Their appearance across this territory suggests they moved through the trade and cultural networks that connected communities from the interior of Russia to the Baltic coast in the 11th and 12th centuries. The same basic creature appeared on pendants worn by women in settlements separated by hundreds of kilometres, which means the imagery itself carried meaning that was widely understood and widely desired.

The Problem With Calling It a Horse

The horse identification has always had complications. The creature in complete examples does not look straightforwardly like a horse. Its head is disproportionately large relative to its body. Its mouth is unusual. Its overall anatomy mixes features that do not belong to a single recognizable animal. Scholars have proposed alternatives over the years: dog, leopard, lynx. None of the proposed identifications has been fully convincing, because none fully accounts for the combination of features the pendants actually show.

Latvian archaeologist Roberts Spirģis proposed a different answer. The creature on the pendants, he argued, matches the leucrota.

What the Leucrota Was

The leucrota appears in the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder, the Roman encyclopaedist who compiled one of the ancient world’s most comprehensive accounts of natural and fantastical knowledge in the first century AD. Pliny described it as a creature from India, combining the body of a lion with the hindquarters of a stag and the neck, tail, and chest of a lion. It supposedly had the speed to outrun any animal known to the Romans. Its mouth was unlike any other creature’s: instead of separate teeth, it had a continuous ridge of bone running from ear to ear. And it could imitate the human voice.

This last detail was the most unsettling. An animal that spoke like a person, that could call out in recognizable human tones, sat at a particular intersection of the familiar and the monstrous that made it memorable across centuries of natural history writing and, later, medieval bestiary literature. The leucrota was not simply a dangerous animal. It was an animal that crossed a boundary that animals were not supposed to cross.

The image survived well into the medieval period. Bestiaries, the illustrated catalogues of real and imaginary animals that circulated widely in medieval European manuscripts, preserved and elaborated on classical descriptions of fantastical creatures including those sourced ultimately from Pliny. The communities that produced and wore the pendants in 11th-century Russia and the Baltic had access, directly or indirectly, to this inherited tradition of knowledge about the creatures the Roman world had catalogued.

Why the Leucrota Might Fit Better

Spirģis argued that the visual features of the Smolensk-type pendant match the leucrota more closely than they match any ordinary animal. The oversized head with its unusually wide mouth corresponds to the bone-ridge jaw that Pliny described. The mixed anatomical features reflect the composite nature of a creature assembled from parts of different animals. The curled tail fits neither horse nor dog convincingly, but sits more comfortably on a creature defined by its hybridity.

Spirģis also connected the image with the spread of Christianity through the region, challenging earlier interpretations that treated the pendant purely as a survival of pre-Christian horse symbolism. If the creature depicted is a beast from classical natural history transmitted through Christian literary tradition, then the pendant may reflect not pagan belief but the new intellectual and religious world that Christianity carried with it into medieval Rus’ and the Baltic. Whether worn as protection against the beast itself or as a symbol of something else entirely, the identification changes what the pendant means.

The identification remains a hypothesis. Other scholars have not abandoned the conventional labels, and the debate continues. But the leucrota reading has gained enough traction that a complete example of the pendant type has served as the official emblem of the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2004, a recognition of the object’s significance to the field.

A District That Was Not a Suburb

The find also adds to a growing reappraisal of the Zavelychye district where it was found. Zavelychye occupies the western bank of the Velikaya River, directly across from Pskov’s historic centre. For a long time, it was understood as a peripheral medieval suburb, a secondary zone on the outer edge of the city’s important spaces.

Excavations conducted since the early 21st century have changed that picture substantially. Wealthy urban estates dating to the 11th and 12th centuries have been identified across the district. Earlier investigations in Zavelychye uncovered domestic compounds, a stone-paved road, and objects associated with armed conflict. Archaeological evidence suggests that parts of northern Zavelychye were violently destroyed during attacks in the first half of the 13th century. The 2026 excavations on Paromenskaya Street also recovered handmade pottery fragments dating to the third quarter of the first millennium CE, indicating that people were already active in this area centuries before the medieval neighbourhood reached its height.

A pendant head from a woman who lived here in the 11th or 12th century, wearing an amulet shaped like a creature that may or may not have been called a horse, places one life within a district that was wealthier, more active, and more connected to the wider medieval world than its old label as a suburb suggested.

What a Label Conceals

The pendant has been called a horse for decades because the label was available, was widely applied, and nobody pushed hard against it. What Spirģis’ hypothesis makes visible is that the label may have been closing off a more interesting question. The creature on these pendants was widely worn across a region stretching from Smolensk to the Baltic coast over at least two centuries. The communities that wore it shared something in their understanding of what it depicted and what it meant. Knowing what they thought they were wearing would tell us something about how Roman natural history, Christian learning, and local belief met and combined in medieval northern Europe.

Only the head of the Pskov pendant survives. But that head connects a medieval woman who lived in a district beside a Russian river to a fantastical creature that Pliny the Elder described from India, that medieval scribes copied into bestiaries, and that someone, in the 11th century, decided to cast in metal and hang from a chain. Whatever it was, it meant something. Figuring out what is still the work in progress.

Sources

Archaeological Center of the Pskov Region. Official announcement, 2026 excavation season, Olginsky-10, Paromenskaya Street, Pskov. https://vk.com/arheologpskov