Union Académique Internationale

Project nº91, adopted in 2017.

The project Corpora of Pre-Modern Christian Orthodox Mural Painting was approved by the General Assembly of the Union Académique International in October 2017 in Tokyo. On March 3rd 2018 in Sofia the first meeting of the managers of the national teams: Prof. Nenad Makuljevic (Belgrade University), Prof. Liliana Stosic (Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts), Assoc. Prof. Konstantinos Giakoumis (European University of Tirana) and Dsc Constantin Ciobanu (Romanian Academy) took place. The mechanisms under which the projects run under the auspices of Union Académique International were explained and a template for the description of the church frescoes was provided by Assoc. Prof. Emmanuel Moutafov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) in his capacity of a project leader. Dr. Ioannis Vitaliotis of the Academy of Athens, to whom again extended an invitation to the Research Center for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art to take part in the project, was also invited to the meeting. He pledged to hand over the invitation to Academician P. Vokotopoulos, but so far, the response from the Greek team has not been received. During the last decades the Bulgarian colleagues have been working hard on the third project related to the Corpora of Pre-Modern Christian Orthodox Mural Painting. Published so far are the Corpus of 18th Century Murals in Bulgaria (2006) and the Corpus of 17th century Murals in Bulgaria (2012). As a result of the scientific research, carried out on the last project, the Corpus of Mural Paintings from the First Half of the 19th Century in Bulgaria, Sofia 2018, ISBN 978-954-8594-73-8, was prepared. The book contains 900 pages of text, with 441 color illustrated pages. It presents 1,115 photos of all monuments with frescoes from the territory of modern Bulgaria, dating back to the first half of the 19th century. The content of the Corpus includes 52 monuments of murals, presented as individual corpus units. In the Prologue of the publication in the form of an academic paper another 40 murals are shown. The iconographic index is compiled in a bilingual version – in Bulgarian and English, to help foreign specialists in search of a particular subject or icon of a saint. The publication also contains about 2,000 plans of mural paintings and over 10,000 taken down inscriptions by authors and epigraphs. The format of the book has also been improved and will serve as a benchmark for future editions of colleagues from Serbia, Albania and Romania participating in the Union Académique International project. The scholars that have worked on the last Corpus include: Emmanuel Moutafov, Alexander Kuyumdzhiev, Elena Genova, Ivan Vanev, Margarita Kuyumdzhieva, Maya Zaharieva, Katerina Dyulgerova, Nevena Dzhurkova, Ivanka Gergova, Christo Andreev, Svetla Moskova, Mina Hristemova, Nikolay Klisarov, Mariela Stoykova, Julia Varbanova. The graphic design of the publication is the work of Maya Lacheva. The cover is designed by the artist Daniel Nechev. The translations from Greek are by E. Moutafov and M. Hristemova, and the English translation – by Svetlana Lazarova. The team was numerous and diverse, making its management a real challenge. During the project, 35 field trips were made, with more than 100 cities and villages in Bulgaria visited. The Corpus of Mural Paintings from the First Half of the 19th Century in Bulgaria was implemented with the financial support of the Scientific Research Fund of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Bulgaria.