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Learning is nothing but remembering. The ruin is the veiled memory of the past reality, its essence. Buildings tend to lose their shape due to ongoing wear as textures finishes lead to a new plastic expression, in an uncontrolled and random process that introduces new esthetic vision and interpretation. All the unfinished or incomplete stimulates our imagination mentally insinuating the presence of the fragmented object in its origin. This paper takes the form of a dissertation on the concept of "ruin" and its evolution in the Western thinking, being a reflection on the representation of the architectural remains of the past and their changes from an esthetic point of view: from their representation as a symbolic object, to their transformation as an element of scientific research; from the actual ruin to the invented one; from the harmony-creating ruin in nature to the one generating unease and distress.; from the ruin that shows us the capacity for analysis and study, to the current one, which faces us to our own capacity for destruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the archaeological find of a medieval sword recovered from the riverbank deposits of the Voglajna near Bežigrad, northeast of Celje (Slovenia). The relatively well-preserved sword with a length of 95.2 cm and a mass of 765 g is part of the original collection of the Celje Regional Museum, to which it came before 1889. The shape and metric characteristics of the blade with a relatively wide fuller (Oakeshott’s Type X or Geibig’s Variant 5b) and the hilt with a short, straight crossguard and almond-shaped/lenticular pommel (Geibig’s combination Type 16 / Var. I (16-15-9-12)) show it to be an early example of swords with pommels of Oakeshott’s Type A, dating to the 11th or the first half of the 12th century. One side of the blade bears the remains of a 20 cm long sequence of inlaid iron marks, which remain indecipherable due to corrosion. The harmony of the parts seems to indicate a preserved original design, presumably produced by one of the sword workshops on the Middle Rhine. The findspot of the sword in the vicinity of Bežigrad, a topographically exposed and strategically important promontory near the intersection of the routes connecting Styria and Carniola, alerts to the possible existence of a military post that supplemented the control functions of the presumed early stronghold of the Margraves of the Savinja March on Zgornji (Stari) Grad in Celje. The find context of the sword places it in the predominant category of water finds, but the internal evidence (condition after conservation) of the weapon and the available data on the particular circumstances of the find do not provide sufficient support to explain the background of its sinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]