Big fish: An Archaic fish grill from Apollonia Pontica (Sozopol, Bulgaria)

The article presents a fragmentary terracotta object, identified as a fish grill, discovered on the island of St Kirik in a context dated to the late 6th – early 5th c. BC. It adds to the extremely modest collection of such finds that seem to originate from Miletos, Apollonia’s metropolis, and were transferred from there to Milesian apoikiai – Borysthenes (the island of Berezan), Pantikapaion, and Nymphaion in the Black Sea region, along with only a couple of other sites. While at other places the use of such utensils seems to have died away with the Archaic period, in Apollonia it persisted in the later Classical and Hellenistic times, attested by similar fish grills regularly discovered in ritual fireplaces in the necropolis. The new find from the island of St Kirik allows for tracing this practice to a much earlier period, presumably in a domestic context, and provides an opportunity to take a new look at these intriguing artefacts.