Piraeus Lion

• 1. Introduction

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  The Piraeus Lion is a white marble statue roughly 3 metres, or 9 feet, tall, and it now sits in Venice, far from the Greek harbour that gave it its name. Across its shoulders and flanks run two long inscriptions in runes, the angular alphabet of the Norse world. Scandinavians most likely carved them sometime in the 11th century. A lion from ancient Greece, wearing Viking writing, in an Italian shipyard: nothing about that arrangement seems natural. How did a harbour guardian leave Athens for Venice? Who were the northerners that cut their words into it, and what were they trying to say? And why did the writing stay unrecognised for so long?

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• 2. Lion of the Harbour

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  Around 360 BC, a sculptor shaped the marble lion that would become the signature of a port. By the 1st or 2nd century AD, it stood at Piraeus, the harbour of Athens, and it had become a famous landmark. Its fame grew so large that the harbour itself picked up a new name. In Italian it came to be called Porto Leone, meaning Lion Port, while the port's original name fell out of use.

  The statue sits in a seated pose. Its throat is hollow, and a mark down its back shows where a pipe once ran, now lost. These clues suggest that at some point the lion served as a fountain. A description written in the 1670s says the same thing, reporting that water poured from the lion's mouth into a cistern at its feet. Not long after that account, the lion would be taken from the harbour for good.

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• 3. Spoils of War

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  In 1687, a Venetian naval commander named Francesco Morosini carried the lion away from Piraeus as plunder. This happened during the Great war against the Ottoman Empire, when the Venetians captured Athens. Morosini's cannons damaged the Parthenon, and the harm they did was matched only by his later sack of the city.

  In Venice, the lion went on display at the Arsenal as a symbol of Saint Mark, the city's patron saint. It is one of four lion statues shown there. Today, copies of it stand in the Piraeus Archaeological Museum and in the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm. The message cut into its flanks, though, was added several centuries before the voyage to Venice.

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• 4. Dragon Scroll Runes

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  During the second half of the 11th century, two runic inscriptions were cut into the marble. Their form is an elaborate scroll shaped like a lindworm, a flightless dragon with a serpentine body and either two legs or none. The dragon-headed design closely follows the style of runestones raised in Scandinavia, so the carvers brought a homeland fashion to a Greek harbour statue.

  The source offers two possibilities for who these men were. They could have been Varangians, mercenaries serving the Byzantine Emperor, also called the Eastern Roman Emperor. Or they might have been Vikings who sailed from Scandinavia around the Atlantic coastline of Europe. The answer, if one exists, lies in the words themselves, and reading them proved hard.

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• 5. Recovering the Text

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  Swedish diplomat Johan David Åkerblad was the first to recognise the markings as runes, at the end of the 18th century. Before that, the carvings had gone unidentified. The first translation came in the mid-19th century from Carl Christian Rafn, Secretary of the Kongelige Nordiske Oldskrift-Selskab, which means the Royal Society of Nordic Antiquaries.

  Weather had been unkind to the stone. Erosion left many individual runes barely legible, and translators had to reconstruct some of them, filling gaps to guess which words had been cut. Several scholars have tried to decipher the text since. Rafn published his attempt in 1854, and he marked which letters he could actually see and which he had supplied.

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• 6. Rafn's Warriors

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  Asmund, Asgeir, Thorleif, Thord and Ivar are the names Rafn read on the lion's right side. In his version, they cut the runes at the request of Harold the Tall, even though the Greeks had considered the matter and forbade it.

  On the left side, Rafn found a longer and more martial record. Hakon, Ulf, Asmund and Örn were said to have conquered the port. Together with Harold Hafi, these men imposed a heavy fine because of a revolt among the Greek people. A man named Dalk was held captive in far lands, and Egil had gone on an expedition with Ragnar into Romania and Armenia.

  Some readers tried to find the famous Harald Hardrada in these lines. The dates do not support it, because the carving falls outside the years he served the emperor. Later scholarship would read the inscriptions in a very different light.

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• 7. Brate's Memorial

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  The 1914 translation by Erik Brate is considered the most successful reading of the lion's runes. In his version, the carvers identify themselves with the word suiar, meaning the Swedes. They did not write a boast about conquest. They wrote a memorial.

  Brate's text describes how a man named Horsi was cut down in the midst of his forces. It continues: "But in the harbor the men cut runes by the sea in memory of Horsi, a good warrior." Another line states, "The Swedes set this on the lion." Horsi is praised as a man who "went his way with good counsel" and who won gold in his travels.

  The reading also names craftsmen. Æskell, also written Áskell, and Þorlæifʀ, also written Þorleifr, are said to have had the runes well cut, and they lived in Roslagen. Ulfʀ and another man then colored the carving in memory of Horsi.

  Beyond his name and the words good warrior, the lion tells us nothing more about Horsi.

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