Spotlight on Saints, Scrolls, XML: Rediscovering Bulgaria’s Church Mural Texts

DARIAH is delighted to publish the latest Spotlight article Saints, Scrolls, XML: Rediscovering Bulgaria’s Church Mural Texts. This article is part of the DARIAH Spotlight campaign, a monthly series that focuses on digital scholarship within the DARIAH network.

Written by Dimitar Iliev, Assistant Professor in Ancient Greek and Latin at the Department of Classics of the “St. Kliment Ohridski” University of Sofia, Bulgaria, National Coordinator for Bulgaria in DARIAH-EU and Co-coordinator of the South-East European DARIAH Regional Hub, this article presents the research and technical implementation of the DH project ORASIS which aims to thorough document, publish (in many cases, for the first time in English), and study the (post-)Byzantine inscriptions accompanying church murals in today’s Bulgaria.

This project allowed the first application of an EpiDoc-compliant XML template and front-end to post-Byzantine religious art, as EpiDoc is typically used for monuments of other types and periods. So far, around 30 inscriptions have been digitised, out of the initial set of 230, revealing curious cases of text reuse and reinterpretation, reflecting the shifting boundaries of complex identities so characteristic of South-East Europe during the Ottoman period. The inherent interactivity of digital publication will facilitate the study of the different connections between text and image patterns, many of which are far from obvious, and will thus contribute to our better understanding of the past.