Digitizing the (post-)Byzantine iconographic and inscriptional heritage in Bulgaria

The poster describes the aims and the workflow of a new project at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, that deals with some of the most interesting types of historical inscriptions hitherto poorly covered by Digital Epigraphy. These are the inscriptions accompanying church murals, especially from the (post)-Byzantine world. Byzantine religious art left a rich heritage of artistic canons and conventions that lived on long after Byzantium itself was gone, sometimes in quite different linguistic and cultural contexts. There is a great number of texts written in (sometimes substandard) Byzantine Greek accompanying various religious scenes in churches and monasteries throughout Bulgaria from the period of Ottoman rule (XV-XΙΧ c.). The forms and functions of such inscriptions have rarely been an object of research beyond the scope of art-historical publications where they are usually described as a part of the image. However, such texts, even when they appear extremely short and standardized, enter into a whole range of relations that require further study and proper representation.

            Firstly, there is the question of the place of the inscription in the context of the entire visual composition: a relation that can vary from the simple explanation of a scene to the subtle interplay between a saintly character and the quotation contained in the book or scroll (s)he holds. Then, the issue arises about the intertextual relation of such quotations and the scriptural or liturgical traditions of which they were instances, echoes, etc. As well, the roles of the inscriptions in the larger framework not only of the particular religious building but also of the whole culture of the respective period and the linguistic competence of its audiences needs examination.

            The poster describes the methodology which aims at resolving such complex issues through the EpiDoc-based tools elaborated during the work on the Telamon collection of the ancient Greek inscriptions from Bulgaria. For the processing, indexing, and publication of the texts and the images, our own AIAX EpiDoc front-end service is customized and applied. For the accurate and user-friendly representation of the different connections of the texts with their wider iconographical, intertextual, and cultural contexts, a conceptual model is currently being created. According to this model, different authority files will be linked to the metadata of the particular texts in ways that will allow for the searching and the organizing of the monuments according to intersections of different classifying criteria. A demonstration of the online collection will accompany the presentation.