Beograd kao Novi Jerusalim. Razmišljanja o recepciji jednog toposa u doba despota Stefana Lazarevića
Belgrade as New Jerusalem. Reflections on the Reception of a Topos in the Age of Despot Stefan Lazarevic

Summary/Abstract: In the Vita of despot Stefan Lazarevic, Belgrade is compared to Jerusalem. The use of this topos is aimed at a social construction of meaning within the framework of historically determined cultural discourse, based on the premise that culture itself can be observed as a complex system of signs constantly open to redefinition. This implies that the approach to its more profound understanding must rely on a method based on reconceptualization of the problem of text and context. Therefore, the true object of investigation becomes the relation between text and society whose activities are themselves perceived as a sort of behavioral text, in which that relation functions as two homologous systems of signs. As a result, our attention is focused on activities which produce social and cultural phenomena and objects — actually on the means by the use of which a world filled with meaning is created. Apart from texts, those means, as real as the text itself, belong to the instruments of creating sacred space or hierotopy, a phenomenon historically recognized as translatio Hierosolymi. Beyond any doubt, in the eyes of homo medievalis, the apsolute paradigm o hierotopic activity is Constantinople, the capital of the Empire and universal model through the emulation of which or through the appropriation of whose elements of identity (ranging from cults of saints to visual identity) throughout history, and in particular in the later middle ages (especially following the events of 1204), a growing number of other points in the Christian oikoumene gains the status of center as a God-chosen and God-protected place — Arta, Trebizond and Nicea, Paris and Venice, Novgorod and Moscow, to name just the most prominent examples.

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