In the Seventeenth Century Muscovites Loved Cats So Much That They Depicted Them Wearing Crowns

During work at two archaeological sites in Moscow, on Tverskaya Street and on the grounds of the Chizhevsky Compound on Nikolskaya Street, clay tiles were discovered bearing the image of a cat in a crown. Both items are the work of Moscow craftsmen who lived 400 years ago.

What sort of cat this was, whether the very same one that appears in images of Athena, sometimes even perched on the goddess's head, or some exclusively crowned celebrity, remains for us to work out.

One thing is at least clear: tiles with crowned cats were used to decorate stoves in the well-to-do houses of Moscow much earlier too, as far back as the 1500s, and were by no means a rarity