page_title: Fortress of Tustan
section_title: Petroglyphs
hierarchical_section_title: Fortress of Tustan / Petroglyphs
caption_attribution_description: Українська: Зображення рівнораменного хреста, Тустань
context_page_description: Tustan was a Medieval cliff-side fortress-city and customs site of the 9th—16th centuries, an Old Rus cliff-side defensive complex. Its remains are located in the Ukrainian Carpathians, in the Skole district of the Lviv oblast, near the village of Urych, southwards from the town of Boryslav and to the southern-east from the village of Skhidnytsia. The unique monument of history, archeology, architecture, and nature is situated amidst the woods of Pidhorodtsi Forestry and is part of the Tustan Site Museum.
  Tustan was a defence and administrative center as well as a customs site on the important salt route leading from Drohobych through Transcarpathia to Western Europe.
context_section_description: Rock surface images (petroglyphs) belong to a vast and somewhat mysterious area of monuments of ancient culture and art. Rock images of Tustan are mostly located on the largest and central group, Kamin, and are in difficult to reach places.
  Among all Tustan petroglyphs, the researcher Mykola Bandrivskyi paid attention to a group of images shaped like a circle, a disk or schematic roundish figures. Such signs are called solar signs. The researcher analysed the location of those solar signs and came to a conclusion that they were put on rock surfaces in accordance with a certain system.  However, not all researchers agree with the theory about the handmade origin of “solar signs”. In particular, a professor of geology Bohdan Ridush proved that those are natural reliefs of petrified sponges, which appeared in the process of sandstone weathering.
  Handmade petroglyphs also survived in Tustan. Individual images of animals are particularly interesting: a wolf chasing an elk, a horse and a rider. During archeological excavations led by M. Rozhko, on the slopes of Velyke Krylo (Ukr. “big wing”) a group of petroglyphs was discovered, including five axes, two crosses, and one swastika.
  A large group of petroglyphs could have been created in the 18th–20th centuries, when the rocks of Tustan were a well-known tourist attraction. A significant group of the monuments is made of heraldic signs. They are mostly tridents as well as symbols of various organizations.
caption: Petroglyph of Tustan
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