Средновековна „българска“ църква в района на планината Томор (Албания)
A medieval “Bulgarian” church in the region of Mount Tomorr

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the unusual attribution of a little-known and unpublished medieval church in the town of Çorovoda (the region of Mount Tomorr) to the Bulgarian medieval heritage by members of the local Albanian community. The case is noteworthy because it represents an atypical situation in the contemporary Balkans, where the prevailing trend is rather the opposite – the “appropriation” of Bulgarian medieval cultural and historical heritage. The church was discovered by chance in 1993 during construction work on the private property of the Sulce family. Rescue excavations were carried out, but no documentation from them was archived or published. It is a very small three-aisled church. The internal dimensions of the naos are 5.93 × 4.60 m. Today its walls serve as the structure of a newly built garage. Three rectangular pillars supporting the former roofing – most likely vaulted – have also been preserved. The remaining parts, including the apse, were demolished. There appears to have been no narthex, which is typical of monuments from the Late Middle Ages in the western Bulgarian lands. The building was destroyed by an intense fire that left a layer of ash and charcoal 0.25–0.30 m thick. Both the walls and the pillars were fully painted. The most interesting element of the mural decoration is a relatively well-preserved nine-line liturgical Greek inscription on the eastern end of the northern wall. It is written on an open scroll beside the figure of a bishop facing east – an iconographic scheme that became common in Byzantine painting after the twelfth century. The text is rare. It was written in Greek and contains the opening words of the prayer recited quietly by the priest before the reading of the Holy Gospel in the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom: “ Ἔλλαμψον ἐν ταῖς καρδίαις ἡμῶν, φιλάνθρωπε Δέσποτα, τὸ τῆς σῆς θεογνωσίας ἀκήρατον φῶς...”. Its appearance in Byzantine liturgy is no earlier than the twelfth century. The archaeologist N. Çuni cautiously dates the church to the twelfth–thirteenth century. The content of the prayer allows the execution of the painting to be associated with the hesychast doctrine and to be placed between the mid-fourteenth and the early fifteenth century. It is noteworthy that this late medieval Greek text became the reason for local residents to identify the church as Bulgarian and to date it to 904. I argue that this stems from a collective understanding that all medieval Christian monuments in the region are a priori linked to the Bulgarian ethnic and political presence of that distant period, given that the re-evangelization of the area in the late ninth and tenth centuries was initiated by the Bulgarian rulers. This historical memory is continuously reinforced by preserved local Slavic toponyms and legends about Bulgarians from the Early Middle Ages as founders of settlements in the region.

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