Assoc. Prof. Dr Emmanuel Moutafov gives an interview for BGNES
‘Sticking to the roots and the Christian tradition gives meaning to our national identity’, Assoc. Prof. Dr Emmanuel Moutafov, Director of the Institute of Art Studies said for BGNES.
He elaborated on the project funded by the Bulgarian National Science Fund (BNSF), Ministry of Education and Science and its outcome, an all-encompassing book Corpus of Murals of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century in Bulgaria.
He led a team working on a three-year project and the 5-kg Corpus comes as a result of the research into the wall-painting programmes of churches of the first half of the nineteenth century in what is now Bulgaria, conducted by a team of experts from the Institute of Art Studies, BAS and associates from universities and museums across the country.
‘The project supposed very hard fieldwork on a grand scale: visiting villages, towns and cities to take pictures of the murals, process them and only then start writing descriptions of each of the 52 churches covered in the book. There was, of course a period of very serious pre–work done by our colleague, Assoc. Prof. Alexander Kuyumdjiev, who had studied these churches, collecting the best part of the material. Thus, a plan was devised of the implementation of the project and the work of most of the team members was made easier as they used his research as a basis. All the sixteen members of the team added their own observations’, Assoc. Prof. Moutafov said.
The voluminous book (900 pp., 1,200 pictures of monuments) contains 52 mural monuments, presented in entries describing each of them. The Corpus is prefaced by a general study featuring over 40 other painted churches.
‘In his introduction, Alexander Kuyimdjiev comments 40 other painted churches within what is now Bulgaria that have unclear dates attached to them. Some of these are erroneously dated to the first half of the nineteenth century and the decoration of others is fragmented. What we present here are around 100 churches, which are key monuments within Bulgaria. Complete and comprehensive information about them is provided, including their architectural designs, quality and type of building, stone statuary. Schemes of the murals are given and the iconographic programmes are commented for no scene has been painted at random. Each scene draws on the local cults and various specifics of the people who went to a certain church’, Dr Moutafov underscored.
He says that the book is unique in its volume, but also in the improved format of presenting monuments. It contains only the churches with murals of the first half of the nineteenth century for there are even more such churches of the second half of the same century. ‘It would have been impossible to provide information about the latter in the same book’, Dr Moutafov specified.
The major contribution of the book is the comprehensive publishing of the inscriptions, which at the time were inscribed in Church Slavonic and in Greek. ‘It suggests that educated people of the age were still well versed in Greek language and there’s nothing fatal about this: I’d put in that in the invasion of Russia by Napoleon, most of the Russian nobility knew not Russian. They communicated in French for that was the language of the aristocracy. We had no aristocracy whatsoever, but intelligent people were fluent in Greek as well’, Dr, Moutafov added.
The book is of equal interest to experts and art lovers.
‘It is for the first time here that detailed information is provided about the iconographic programme of the catholicon of the Monastery of Bachkovo, which is among the most frequented in Bulgaria. Those who happen to be interested may now see which saints are represented in which scenes, etc. Such knowledge especially among the younger generations is even a matter of national security. When one knows one’s roots and is aware of the Christian nature of the European civilization, one would never become a victim of provocations, of recruitment by foreign services or, God forbid, by Islamist extremist organisations, etc.’, he believes.
Assoc. Prof. Dr, Moutafov thinks that such a fundamental study adding value to our national identity can be conducted solely by proper researchers. ‘Thus research units in Bulgaria make sense of their existence, which is unthinkable without public support. Such a study is possible only with an infrastructure behind it’, he emphasised.
The study proved a significant fact: with all the European influences, the tradition of the Eastern Orthodox art of the first half of the nineteenth century was still alive. Then come the patterns, models and to some extent, the techniques that have been established as early as the fifteenth century. Part of the murals are of lower quality and one of the reasons for this is in the favourable conditions created in the Ottoman Empire after 1835 for the construction of new churches. ‘That meant a number of commissions. New representations were adopted related to the Western influences or the influences of the traditions of other Balkan nations. A nice finding was a donor’s portrait of a bishop of the eighteenth century on the ambo at the catholicon of the Monastery of Bachkovo, after undergoing cleaning’, Dr Moutafov said.
The authors of the book believe that it would contribute also to the development of cultural and religious tourism as each of its chapters may well be used as a travel guide of a kind.
Owing to its undoubted contribution to the studies of Orthodox art of the period 15th–19th cc., the Institute of Art Studies has been since 2017 an inter-academic project coordinator under the auspices of the Union Académique International, titled Corpora of Pre-modern Christian Orthodox Mural Painting, implemented by teams from the Bulgarian, Serbian and Albanian academies. The foreign teams are following the format of presentation of the material established in the Corpus of Murals of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century “, as over the years this series became a method of work adopted internationally as modus Bulgaricus.
Corpus of Murals of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century is scheduled to be launched in October, in Sofia and in autumn 2019, the book will be presented in Paris on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the Union Académique International.
Available in Bulgarian at http://www.bgnes.com/bylgariia/obshchestvo/4604976/
