Dimitar Iliev
National Coordinator of Bulgaria, Member of the National Coordinator Committee
Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"
The region of South-East Europe has always been one of history’s main zones of contact, where the tectonic plates of human civilisations meet and overlap, sometimes generating dramatic fault lines, sometimes contributing to the formation of multifaceted and resilient religious and ethnolinguistic identities.
The vast territory lying approximately between the islands of Crete and Cyprus in the Aegean Sea and the district of Suceava in today’s Romania, has been a part of three large empires (Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman), as well as many other countries, historical and modern, and the melting pot of multiple languages and cultures through the ages. One of the peculiar features of this idiosyncratic melting pot is Eastern Orthodoxy, with its characteristic modes of expression through ritual, music, architecture, and visual arts (such as icons and murals). Such modes of expression have taken shape primarily in the Mediaeval Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantium (ca. 330-1453 CE) and its broader area of cultural influence (sometimes referred to as the Byzantine Commonwealth), and were further established among different Orthodox peoples in the Ottoman Empire (ca. 1299-1922) during the so-called Post-Byzantine period. The visual lingua franca of post-Byzantine religious art was often accompanied by inscriptions in Greek, in accordance with the best traditions of artistic centres such as Constantinople or Crete. From the lands of Bukovina to the valley of the Strymon (Bulgarian: Struma) river, these Greek texts entered into complex relationships with their corresponding images, and into even more interesting interactions with their spectators, who were not necessarily competent in the scriptural and liturgical Greek of the scrolls and mural legends.
The ORASIS Project was launched in the framework of CLa-DA-BG (https://clada-bg.eu/), the national node of DARIAH and CLARIN in Bulgaria, based on the achievements of a previous collection, the TELAMON database of Ancient Greek inscriptions from Bulgaria (https://telamon.uni-sofia.bg/). The ORASIS project team consists of Tsvetan Vasilev (a Professor of post-Byzantine epigraphy at the Department of Classics, University of Sofia), Dimitar Iliev (a digital classicist at the same Department), Ivan Amzov (webmaster), Kristiyan Simeonov (NLP assistant, R1 researcher at the Department of Classics, University of Sofia), Elisaveta Moussakova (a Professor of Art History, Bulgarian National Library) and other contributors. The beta version of the collection (still under construction) can be seen here: https://orasis.epistone.net/.
The project’s main objectives are the thorough documentation, publication (in many cases, for the first time in English), and study of the (post-)Byzantine inscriptions accompanying church murals in today’s Bulgaria. Such inscriptions have often been neglected as objects of research on their own. Moreover, some of the religious buildings where they were found and photographed are not widely accessible and are currently in a bad state of preservation. Sometimes these inscriptions can reveal curious cases of ‘wandering’ texts and of various approaches towards the written word on the part of different painters and artistic schools, and raise curious questions no less interesting than the colourful sacred images they accompany.
The name of the ORASIS project is derived from the Greek verb ὁράω “to see, to look, to observe”. Thus, ὅρασις is “the act of seeing” or “vision”. The researchers try to put themselves in the place of a visitor to a Christian monument from the Balkans – a church or a monastery – who contemplates the scenes on the frescoes as well as their inscriptions, trying to decipher their messages. They also walk in the shoes of an explorer looking for parallels in different churches, trying to detect patterns, and to identify artistic influences, schools, and centres. At the same time, the project explores these texts from the vantage point of the philologist, delving into the specific language of the painters of the era, some of the most erudite people of their time, for whom there is often no documentary evidence of their lives, other than the messages that have survived on the stone, the wall, or the icon.
The starting point of the project is the creation of a digital corpus of ca. 230 Greek inscriptions from 17th-century churches and monasteries in today’s Western Bulgaria. The basis of the initial collection is a monograph published by Tsvetan Vasilev (Vasilev 2017). Much of the monumental religious art in that period used Slavic in its accompanying texts, while, in other areas, Greek was still the language of choice. Western Bulgaria was the contact zone where both influences mingled. As the geographic region within the scope of the research was, by that time, falling under the influence of the Patriarchate of Peć (Fig. 3), this predetermined the specific linguistic situation and the coexistence of both Cyrillic and Greek inscriptions. Mixed or multiethnic teams of painters used to work on the selected monuments. The possible reader responses to such texts (which have been preserved in documentary sources) on the part of the target audiences in these places, where knowledge of Greek (as all other contemporary sources indicate) was not predominant, are an interesting object of research for art historians, social historians, linguists, and scholars in the field of religious studies.
The inscriptions in the pilot collection of the project are encoded according to an EpiDoc–compliant XML template. EpiDoc is a subset of TEI XML especially developed for the encoding, visualisation, and interchange of historical documents like inscriptions on stone and papyri. The EpiDoc initiative is supported by an active international community and regularly releases updated versions of encoding guidelines and RNG schemas. Based on the latter, the ORASIS collection has built its own XML template suitable for the peculiarities of the source material, taking into account features like the place of the image within the wider iconography of the church itself.
ORASIS partly relies on the established workflow and the technical tools developed for the TELAMON collection of ancient inscriptions in Greek from Bulgaria (https://telamon.uni-sofia.bg/), where some of the team also participate. For the purposes of TELAMON, the AIAX front-end tool has been created. A modified version of AIAX is also used for the digital edition of the post-Byzantine religious murals. AIAX stores the XML files in an SQL database. It uses PHP to find, collect, visualise, and filter documents according to their encoded elements, attributes, and values. In this way, it produces the digital representation of each encoded inscription on a separate web page and also makes different filters and search criteria applicable to the whole collection.
Most previous paper publications of these inscriptions (if such exist and are accessible at all) describe, represent, and study the text as just another part of the sacred image. The specific methods of epigraphy is the thorough representation of texts as objects of interest in themselves are rarely applied: abbreviations are not resolved, lost parts of the text are not indicated and are not even tentatively restored. The ORASIS collection aims to give more prominence to the texts themselves using the available tools of Digital Epigraphy – not neglecting, however, the iconographic context in which these texts functioned, and also providing metadata, commentaries, and high-quality photographic images to ensure a holistic experience on the part of the user. As to the encoded texts, their editorial representation (e.g, fillings of lacunae, expansions of abbreviations, etc.) is compliant with the so-called Leiden+ system (see Krumrey and Panciera 1980), hitherto more commonly used for classical epigraphy and papyrology.
This is the first application of an EpiDoc-compliant 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; most of them are already published on the ORASIS platform, and bugs and omissions in the front-end representation are currently being rectified. The inscriptions often show 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: this foreign country, which oddly feels like home.
Bakalova, E., T. Vasilev, “Images and Texts Across Time: The Three Layers of Mural Paintings in the Church of St George in Sofia”, In: Mutafov, E., I. Toth (eds.), Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art: Crossing Borders. Art Readings 2017 (Sofia, 2018), 171-191
Norish, J., P. Yordanova, EpiDoc Front-End Services (EFES) User Guide and Technical Documentation (2018), available at: https://github.com/EpiDoc/EFES/wiki
Ts. Vasilev, The Greek Language in the Churches with Mixed Inscriptions from the XVII c. in Bulgaria (Sofia University Press, Sofia, 2017) [in Bulgarian: Василев, Цв., Гръцкият език в църквите със смесено съдържание от ΧVII в. В България (София: УИ „Св. Климент Охридски“, 2017)].
Tom Elliott, Gabriel Bodard, Elli Mylonas, Simona Stoyanova, Charlotte Tupman, Scott Vanderbilt, et al. , EpiDoc Guidelines: Ancient documents in TEI XML (Version 9.7) (2007-2026), available at: https://epidoc.stoa.org/gl/latest/
Krummrey. H., S. Panciera, “Criteri di edizione e segni diacritici”, Tituli 2 (1980), 205-215
National Coordinator of Bulgaria, Member of the National Coordinator Committee
Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"