By Marilyn May
Milford History
Some cultures decorated the bull’s horns using ropes with tassels, such as on this sculpted frieze on the Ara Pacis, the famous Altar of Peace in Rome, consecrated in 9 BCE.
Even if you have lived in this city your whole life, it is a good bet that you have never seen the bucrania in downtown Milford. If you have seen them, have you wondered why they are here?
Bucrania is an architectural embellishment depicting a sacrificial bull’s skull with the horns draped with garlands. It is believed to have been a religious symbol found in the archeological digs of pagan settlements in Turkey. The word means “bull’s head or ox head.”
Bull’s heads? Pagan symbols? On Milford’s on City Hall?
Yes. Take a look above the columns on the front of City Hall. There you will see four sculpture-like bovine skulls draped with garlands that were symbols originally used by the Neolithic people.
We do not have to go back that far to find out why bucrania were used on City Hall – just to 1916 and the rebuilding of the municipal building that was destroyed by fire in 1915. The architect, Michael Donegan, decided to pattern the colonial revival building on President Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home.
Jefferson liked the use of embellishments based on ancient classical precedents, so he asked that bucrania be used on his house.
That explains why symbols on Jefferson’s Virginia house ended up in downtown Milford. Meanwhile, the Superior Court across West River Street was built in 1937 and is adorned with two more bucrania. That structure is an art deco classical revival.
The origin of this motif goes back more than 9,500 years. In 1958, archeologists working in central Turkey near Konya found that bucrania was the most prevalent three-dimensional art form used in Catalhoyuk, one of the oldest cities in the world. Habitation there began about 7,500 BCE.
Archeologists cannot recreate a specific context for the art form, but it is believed to have had pagan religious significance. The researchers found that thousands of villagers in Catalhoyuk had put plaster-covered animal skulls on the walls of their homes. The horns were decorated with flowers, fruit or ropes with tassels. The bull was worshipped as a sacred animal in many cultures.
By the time of the Greek and Roman empires, this symbol represented ritual animal sacrifice to appease the gods. It was used on many public buildings because it was thought that bucrania adornments conveyed refinement and a sense of authority on classical buildings.
It is not known if the Romans were aware of the pagan origins, but architects used the design freely, and it came to represent respect for the ancient world.
Greek and Roman sculpted skulls were found as we see them today adorning a building’s architrave, the long, usually plain horizontal feature that rests on top of the columns.
The next time you are in Turkey you can visit the excavation site at Catalhoyuk. Work began there in 1961 and is still going on.
Marilyn May is a lifelong resident of Milford and a member of the board of the Milford Historical Society.