THE BALKANS

In the autumn semester of 2013, we set off for the Balkans again. This time, there were 18 of us, in two Ford Tranzit cars. The first main stop was the Macedonian city of Ohrid, where we visited several churches and started putting together a picture of local art from the 5th to the 15th century. In the decoration of the churches, iconography is quite stable in the east, especially as far as the twelve great holidays are concerned, which, however, have some difference in design. In addition, we visited the local Gallery of Icons with its unique collection, mainly from the Ohrid area. On the way to Greece, we visited Kurbinovo, which is an example of a style from Nerezi, emphasized on the expressive showing of emotions in each of the narrative scenes. We were able to compare what we learned last year in Nerezi and see a slight improvement in Kurbinovo.

We had two stops in Greece. The first was Kastoria, where we visited several churches. We also encountered various peculiarities here – both architectural (such as the not quite usual use of tribunes) and related to iconography in decoration (e.g., painting pictures resembling icons depicted with hooks, creating the impression of hanging them in the nave, where we thought about the meaning of the icons and its dissemination by “hanging” these paintings in the sacral space).

The second and last stop was Thessaloniki. Immediately, when we saw the local monuments and their extraordinary qualities, we could feel the presence of the place, which was the second most important city in the Empire, after Constantinople. An important period for us, the period of the Byzantine Empire, left many monuments in the city, most of which we managed to visit during our two-day stay in Thessaloniki. During this excursion, we deconstructed the myth of “national schools” in terms of an architectural approach. We understood that, starting with the reign of the Tetrarchs in the 4th century, there was no period that we would necessarily have to call “decline”. Rather, we looked at these artistic expressions in terms of the change of eras and the adaptation of aesthetics. We saw the wandering of workshops, where Thessaloniki played the role of a filter, through which art went and for which Ohrid was the first reception of the center in artistic development.

We supplemented the knowledge we had begun to gather during the first expedition to the Balkans in the autumn of 2012. Thanks to this, we now have a more comprehensive picture of Byzantine art forms in this area.