Fourteenth-Century Precious Icon Revetmens from Nessebar and the Royal Court of Tarnovo
Fourteenth-Century Precious Icon Revetmens from Nessebar and the Royal Court of Tarnovo

Summary/Abstract: The presence of the Tarnovo royal court in Nessebar in the 14th century is attested to in numerous written sources and archaeological finds. Here we will examine three precious icon revetments as evidence of the donation activity of Tsar Ivan Alexander and his family in Nessebar. At the beginning of the 20th century, they were on the iconostasis of the New Metropolitan Church of St. Stephen. Two of the revetments have been preserved, for one we have only archival photographs from the 1920s. On the revetment of the icon of Holy Virgin Eleusa/Hodеgеtria (NAIM–BAS, inv. No. 125) there is a donor’s inscriptions from Samuil, the uncle of Tsar Ivan Alexander, for the renovation of the monastery of Holy Virgin Eleusa in 1341/42. Some of the silver bands with decoration are identical in all three revetments. This points to dating of the other two revetments to the same time, as well as to a donorship by representatives of the Tarnovo royal court. These three large revetments raise the question of whether there was a goldsmith’s workshop in Nessebar that produced them or whether they were imported from Constantinople or Thessaloniki. The exact dating of the revetments also points to a more accurate dating of the 14th century painting of Crucifixion on the two-sided icon, and from there to several other two-sided icons from the Black Sea region, painted by the same icon-painting workshop.

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