From Russia with colour. The manifold and precious charm of kovsh

Kovsh (or kowsch depending on Cyrillic transliteration) is a drinking vessels from Russia, oval-shaped, similar to a ladle, with a handle on one side and a spout on the other. Although correct, this detached definition is a little bit reductive to describe the bright and colourful beauty of these finely and richly decorated masterpieces, whose history retraces similar objects’ ones, such as wine tasters’ or Weinprobierschale’s, that have evolved from tools to taste wine and drinks, to precious decorative objects.

The origins of kovsh are very old and date back to the tenth century. At this time, they were simple wooden products used to drink mead or medovukha, a slightly alcoholic drink derived from honey based on fermented honey. Shape recalled that of a ship, or better, a goose or a duck: the body served as a container, the head and beak were the handle.

It was in the middle of the fourteenth century that the first metal models appeared. In the same period the name kovsh was created, accompanying this curiously shaped object in the following centuries, until today.

Kovsh, even if it would be better to write it in the plural form “kovshi” because of the many variations of shapes, sizes, origins and uses, so much that, over the centuries, have come into use specific terms to differentiate them. The smaller ones were known as piti, distributed one for each guest as real glasses, whereas vynosny, were shared between the dining companions. Kovshi khoromnye belonged exclusively to the Imperial Court and were recognizable by an inscription certifying their origin.

But the most important and famous ones are the zhalovannye: lost their function of containers and enriched with a lot of decorations, from the sixteenth century the kovsh became a symbol of the Tsarist empire, which used them as gifts to officially reward loyal and faithful servants, whose name was engraved on the edge of the receptacle.

From that moment on, the kovsh began to be made of precious metals, decorated with gold and precious stones. Tsar Peter I the Great donated to Frederick Augustus I of Saxony a wonderful example made of gold and niello (a black metal alloy composed of sulphur, copper and silver), decorated with sapphires and pearls.

The kovsh popularity had a gradual decline in the later decades, almost disappearing in the mid-nineteenth century. At the end of that century, however, the kovsh had an impetuous resurgence in fame as a purely ornamental object. The greatest Russian silver masters including Ovchinnikov, Khlebnikov, Maria Semenova and mainly Fabergé created colourful samples, mostly decorated with cloisonné technique and adorned with precious stones (cubic zirconia), with the most varied shapes: viking boats, horses, swans and other water birds.

The kovsh, in its characteristic shape, was produced until the twentieth century, but influenced and modified by a multitude of styles and currents, including the Art Nouveau, and realized in a wide variety of materials, to the point that it lost forever from its former role, now only a distant memory.