Светилище в Столоватец

The marble stelae were found by chance during ploughing in 1953, in the field of Ilia Radushin on the eastern slope of the hill of the same name. The historian Tacho Tanev, then interned in the town by the communist authorities, noticed the slab and saved it for Bulgarian historical science. Tanev dated the find to the Late Bronze Age. In the early 1970s the numismatist Todor Gerasimov attributed the slab to the Celts, which raised a scholarly dispute.

The published account by the archaeologist Goranka Toncheva in the magazine “Kosmos” states that a local resident, Atanas Astinov, happened to notice a slab with images in Radushin's field. Radushin paid no attention to it and for a time used it as a bridge over the ditch in front of his house. The stele was afterwards stood up temporarily on the stone wall of his house, where Tanev, passing by, noticed the images, recognised the importance of the slab, and had it taken to the Nikola Parapunov House-Museum.

Excavations at Stolovatets in the 1960s under Toncheva uncovered the ruins of a small П-shaped cult building open to the east, built in the Hellenistic period, in which the slabs had been reused as wall filling. Archaeologists suppose that the stelae were originally placed inside the building so as to be lit by the rising sun. The monument is held to be dedicated to a solar cult, as the geometric decoration of the slabs suggests: linked triskeles and double spirals, both ancient solar symbols.

The largest stele shows a radiant sun in the middle of a boat-shaped two-headed dragon, before which stands an upright male phallic figure putting his left hand into the serpent's mouth. Three Thracian burial mounds lie west of the sanctuary and, according to Markov, undoubtedly belong to the cult complex.