17 Jan 2024

Liturgical Objects in the Context of Art of Goldsmithing During the Period of Ottoman Rule (based on materials from the Diocese of Plovdiv)

Head: Principal Assist. Prof. Darina Boykina, PhD, from the Fine Arts Sector
Collective project funded by the Research Fund through the Contest for Fundamental Research Funding for Young Scientists and Postdoctoral Students – 2023.
The project aims to conduct an up-to-date and in-depth study of liturgical objects from the period of Ottoman rule in the diocese of Plovdiv. The first goal of the project is to expand the corpus of known to science silver objects from liturgical practices. The collected new empirical material, its merging with the available information about already known works and systematization in a database will build a good basis for a subsequent in-depth analysis of the works of goldsmith art with church use. The other important goal is to study the local goldsmith guilds that functioned during the period of Ottoman rule on the territory of Central Southern Bulgaria, as well as the goldsmith workshops or factories from which the imported church plate originates. The accumulation of information on the places of production of liturgical objects will make it possible to clarify the artistic context in which the objects were created. An equally important goal of the study is to clarify the historical circumstances that led to the emergence of liturgical objects. Its implementation envisages an analysis of the documented goldsmith’s works, the search for and systematization of the available information about the church plate in the churches in the Plovdiv Diocese from written sources and archival documentation.
The implementation of the project and the achievement of the expected results will direct the attention of the scientific community and experts in the field of the preservation of cultural heritage in Bulgaria and abroad to a relatively poorly developed area of Bulgarian art history. The innovation of the research is expressed in the study of works of goldsmiths unknown to science, the collection of information about liturgical objects from written sources and archival documents and their placement in historical and cultural contexts. The scientific team will use an interdisciplinary approach, which is based mainly on the methods of art and historical research.
During the implementation of the project, scientific articles in refereed and indexed editions are expected to be published and a first-of-its-kind database of liturgical objects will be built, which will support research of regional and national importance even after the project is reported. The scientific team plans to popularize the results widely on the website of the project and the one of the basic organization, on open science platforms and specialized science sites in the country and abroad, on social media, at a seminar in the final phase of the project, etc. The planned international scientific conference on the topic of the project will draw the attention of a wide range of researchers from Bulgaria and abroad to the problem and will help establish international scientific cooperation.
 
 
Scientific team:
 
Principal Assist. Prof. Darina Boykina, PhD, (Head), Principal Assist. Prof. Nona Petkova, PhD, Principal Assist. Prof. Veselina Yoncheva, PhD, Principal Assist. Prof. Tereza Bacheva, PhD, Vuk Dautović, PhD (University of Belgrade), Dr. Mateja Jerman (University of Rijeka/Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia), PhD student Simeon Simeonov
In problematic module Bulgarian cultural heritage in the European and world context.