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Church singing promotes the transmission of sociocultural relations, attitudes, values, categories and elements of Christianity through tangible signs and messages of verbal art. Church singing is presented here as a model of communication with self-organizing process linking cognitive experience, value orientations and social practical activity. Church singing integrates phonetic symbols, singing and music into a structure of the norms and principles with intrinsic relation and semantic interpretation. Church singing as social communication, is the dynamic of personal acceptance of doctrinal elements, social experience in the form of knowledge about the surrounding world accumulated by Christian culture, principles and skills of community life, socially meaningful productive activity, and criteria of self-determination in a community. In turn, a person not only transmits Christian culture, but also creates and reproduces a tradition, varying it or inventing cultural innovations.
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The study closely traces the fate of Church Slavonic monuments in the collections of the Basilian monasteries since the establishment of the Order of the Basilians in 1617 to the period of socialism. A full quantitative and thematic characterization of the manuscripts and books preserved until today is presented against the background of historical events. The author argues that the collections of the Basilian libraries are unique in character and represent a kind of synthesis between western and eastern traditions.
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The article raises questions of the importance of Orthodox chants in the life of modern society, considers the relevance of their performance on the concert stage, outside the liturgical practice, and analyzes the liturgical repertoire and the dominant factors necessary for the composer, who begins to create Orthodox works. At the same time, the Festivals of Orthodox chants, their spheres of influence on listeners and society are systematized and compared.
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The article treats the iconographic specifics of the cycle of Christ’s acts and miracles at the earliest narthex of the Catholicon of The Assumption, Monastery of Cherepish, which researchers traditionally attribute to the work of St Poemen of Zographou. The study makes also certain observations about their connection with the so-called School of Epirus as evinced in the murals at the Church of St Nicholas of Philanthropenoi in Ioannina, Pamvotida Lake, as well as in other examples in the Balkans and the Athonite monasteries of the age. The analysis shows that the icon-painters were familiar with the models used by the sixteenth-century leading post-Byzantine artistic centres.
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The work aims to present the development of the Zionist movement, historically,with special emphasis on religious Zionism. How is the movement itself highly branched,here we focused on political and religious elements, where we want to show that Zionismis, in essence, is inseparable from Judaism.In the first part of the paper, the historical development of Zionism, we presenteda brief history of the Jewish people and the establishment of the State of Israel, turningfrom God to Abraham, through Haskala, the Jewish question in Russia, pogroms, ZionistCongress, to the proclamation of the state.In the second part, we dealt with religious Zionism, as a separate branch of themovement. We demonstrated that the differences prevailing in the movement but also thecommon elements without suffering the sight of the biblical texts. Special emphasis we puton Gush Emunim, which was of great importance to this movement.
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This paper analyses two already known and several newly revealed quotations from Czech Church Slavonic translation of St. Gregory the Great’s Gospel Homilies in Russian literary documents of the late XIII century: Merilo Pravednoe (“The Just Measure”), more precisely, its non-borrowed articles, and the Letter of Yakov Chernorizets (Jacob the Monk); and also one small fragment in Pravilo Chernoriztsem (“The Canon for Monks”). These quotations are among the earliest witnesses of the said translation and few known cases of its quotation in original Slavic literature. Besides, they present an interesting example of enriching the Slavic literature with rare (for it) biblical quotations and permit (along with other patristic quotations) to attribute a series Eastern Slavic texts to the same literary centre.
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The Iconoclast era of Byzantine history ended with the death of Emperor Theophilus on January 20th, 842. His wife Theodora, who took power in the name of their young son Michael III, devoted to Orthodoxy even during Theophilus’ life- -time, immediately began preparing the ground for the restoration of the veneration of icons. With this aim, she first held counsel with her associates in the state leadership – the Logothete Theoctistus, Sergius Nicetiates and her brothers Bardas and Petronas. At that meeting of the state leadership, the decision was made to renew the cult of icons, and the Empress released from imprisonment and persecution all monks, priests, bishops and lay people who had been persecuted for their veneration of icons. Next she convened the Council in Constantinople where the icon veneration would again be declared the official dogma of the church. The Council was held in early March 843. Participants included representatives of state authorities, priest and monks from the Constantinopolitan and provincial monasteries. The monks of the Capital were led by Hilarion of the Dalmatou, and a major figure among provincial monks was Simeon Stylite the Younger. The spiritual patron of them all was the famous ascetic Joannicius. Only the Studites represented a particular fraction. At the Council a valid Definition of faith was read and proclaimed, that is, the Horos of the Seventh Ecumenical Council of Nicaea 787, which had restored the veneration of icons after the first iconoclast period. The Council of 843 merely recalled the decisions of the Iconoclast Council of 815, and restored the decisions of the Council of 787. At the same Council the iconoclast Patriarch of Constantinople John VII the Grammarian was ousted, and the monk Methodius, a candidate of the provincial monks who also was in the Empress’s favor was chosen for the patriarchal throne. After his election, the people gathered spontaneously in front of St. Sophia and, led by the monks, conducted a procession that carried the icon of the Virgin and the Christ Child to the Bronze gates. This was a symbolic act, since the absence of Icon of Christ from the Gate had symbolized the supremacy of iconoclasm. This spontaneous procession was the forerunner of the later Procession of Orthodoxy. That day, which was the Sunday of the first week of Lent and which fell that year on March 11th, became known as the Sunday of Orthodoxy.
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Тhe paper examines the attitude of Montenegrin Metropolitan Sava Petrović towards the abolition of the Patriarchate of Peć. It elucidates the problems that the Patriarchate of Peć faced from the Belgrade Peace of 1739 until its abolition and merging with the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1766. It highlights the specificities of the Montenegrin Metropolitanate in this period, which differentiated it from other eparchies of the Patriarchate of Peć, but did not affect the absolute and unconditional loyalty of its metropolitans to the throne of the Patriarchate of Peć. It points out the reasons why Metropolitan Sava Petrović did not resolutely stand out against the abolition of the Patriarchate of Peć, although he did not sign the plea requesting such abolition. The question of his relationship with Ecumenical Patriarch Samuel I Chazteris, who requested from Sultan Mustafa III the berat on the confirmation of Sava’s metropolitan dignity, is opened. The reasons why only in 1776 he asked for the support of Moscow Metropolitan Platon for the restoration of the Patriarchate of Peć are explained.
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The village of Gintsi is located in Western Bulgaria, at the foothills of the Western Balkan Range and at about 50 km of Sofia. Once a road connecting Moesia and the river Danube with Sardica and Macedonia used to pass through the village. There were also fortifications around it, as evidenced by the toponym "Kaleto", relevant to two elevations at both sides of the route to Petrohan pass. According to a record dated from 1490, the village had an entirely Christian population, as did the entire area in the vicinity of Sofia. A Turkish register shows that the church in the village, that can be dated from the Middle Ages, continued to exist. According to its plan, the St. Nicholas of Myra belongs to the most widespread type of churches in Bulgarian lands in the Middle Ages and the National Revival, the single-naved basilica. The church has a semi-circular central apse inside and out, a naos and a narthex (added later). The entrance is one from the west, through the narthex into the naos. It has a barrel vault and has a gable roof with wooden casing and tiles, completely in the style of West Bulgarian single-naved churches in the period from the end of the 12-th to the 19-th century. The building technique is traditional for West Bulgarian lands. The material used was hewn and river stone, joint with white mortar. The church was decorated with murals. There were three distinctive period of decoration, with almost nothing remaining from the first murals. The murals are in three artistic layers.
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This article deals with the role of the Orthodox and Protestant Christian Churches for the Bulgarian migrant community in Spain, summarizing that they have an important place in the rituality and festivity, but a limited im¬pact on their social integration. However, the relations between Orthodox and Evangelical communities are even normalized. This is due to the fact that both are immigrant institutions and this implies their secondary impor¬tance in the Society, leading to a minimization of the public opposition be¬tween them. An initial process of Spanishization of the practices exists as a form of cultural influence of the local milieu.
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The Church of St Anne is an unpublished and less well explored monument of the early nineteenth-century in Bulgaria. It was built in the cemetery of the village of Yana, district of Sofia. The paper seeks to present the church comprehensively, making some observations about the historic records, architectural specifics and the iconographic programme of an unpublished monument of the first half of the nineteenth century. The extant paintings of 1845 are not signed, but the iconographic and stylistic particularities refer to a group of monuments associated with Yanachko Stanimirov from village of Breze.
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Until recently, the Church of the Annunciation in the village of Kereka was one of the understudied monuments in Bulgaria of the first half of the nineteenth century. It was erected in the middle of the village, located 8 km from the town of Dryanovo. The paper gives a brief history and an analysis of the architectural specifics, establishing also the iconographic programme and trying to identify the team of painters commissioned to make the murals and the icons. The church has not been entirely painted. Оnly the south and north walls of the naos have been covered with paintings. Тhere are no icons now and the wooden base of the iconostasis has been broken into pieces. It is hard to reconstruct the iconostasis at the church in its entirety for want of information and archival photographs. In the early 1970s it has been entirely preserved, to which a scientifically grounded proposal drafted by the National Institute for Immovable Cultural Heritage testifies. The murals at the Church of the Annunciation in the village of Kereka are unsigned, but their iconographic and stylistic peculiarities associate them with the painters of the School of Tryavna. A number of pictorial specifics point to Krаstyo Zahariev and his sons Georgi and Petаr Krаstevs, painters from Tryavna, who completed the work in 1835–1837.
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Anthony is a highly honoured saint, considered to be a patron and a defender of various diseases. The church “St. Anthony” in the smallest town in Bulgaria – Melnik – is known exactly for its healing aspect and can be identified as one of the most sacred cult sites in the surroundings, connected with numerous stories of miracles, healings, interesting and rare ritual practices. The modern state and functioning of the church is a complex of different components that build the role and importance of the cult site as a very attractive place for pilgrimage and healing. Besides of the cult of the patron itself, these components include also various miraculous objects, iconographic features, the location of the church, and characteristic stories of miracles, media, and personal representations and interpretations. In this article, I will examine the cult of St. Anthony in the city and church dedicated to him through the prism of two basic elements – miraculous objects or other ones in the church area and beliefs and ritual practices related to them. It is precisely the connection between the different components of the cult site, combining diverse objects of pilgrimage, honoring, and usage, that creates a truly unique context in which this church, the only one in the country until recently dedicated to the St. Anthony, exists. The analysis is based on observations from conducted fieldwork studies in Melnik and bibliographic and online surveys in the period 2016–2018.
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The paper deals with a monument, sporadically mentioned in scientific literature, of the earliest period of the Bulgarian National Revival: the Church of St Nicholas in the village of Katunitsa near Plovdiv. Decoration of the church––an iconostasis, icons and murals––has been commissioned on a regular basis well until the end of the period of the Bulgarian National Revival by a number of church donors living mostly in Katunitsa. The iconostasis and the icons in the Deesis tier painted by Zachary Zograph in 1834–1835, were dated to the earliest stage in the decoration of the church coetaneous with the construction of the building. Decades later, the Feast tire of icons were commissioned to be executed by different icon-painters along with the mural paintings at the naos of the church made by Alexy Athanasov. The latter were precisely dated to 1852. The same icon-painter painted the murals flanking the north entrance to the church in 1866. A thorough presentation of the church of the village of Katunitsa is of paramount importance not only because no attempts have been made to record it comprehensively, but also because it adduces examples of the earliest oeuvre of two of the most renowned and prolific icon-painters working in and in the vicinities of the city of Plovdiv, i.e. Zachary Zograph and Alexy Athanasov.
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The article presents a church in the area of Northern Epirus, today’s Southern Albania that is little known in the literature. The church was built in several stages as the year of 1582/3 written on the western façade should be accepted as the final date of its erection. The ktetor’s inscription in the naos witnesses the year when the murals were laid, the year of 1605/6, as all residents of the village contributed to the paintings. The frescoes in both the naos and the narthex were made then. The two icon-painters, Mihail and Nikola, left their names in the inscription. Today there are no icons preserved in the church because they were stolen in 2010. We draw information about them from photographs in several publications. On almost all images there are partial upper layers of painting which were not removed upon the restoration of the frescoes. The program of the mural ensemble is preserved in its entirety and presents an extremely rich iconographic repertory. There are numerous scenes from different cycles: of the Great Feasts, the Passion, the Post-Resurrection appearances of Christ, the Acts and the Miracles of Christ, scenes dedicated to the Holy Mother of God, Old Testament episodes, and others. The murals have been attributed by a number of Greek authors to the famous icon-painter Mihail of Linotopi. The identity of the second icon-painter, Nikola, has not been commented on save for the study of T. Tsambouras. The author thinks his paintings are close to the Linotopi studio and attributes to him several icons originating from the church itself and from other churches in Northern Greece. Getting familiar with the murals on the site allowed us to make some important observations, which give a new meaning to the suggestions made so far. Probably the frescoes were laid in two stages. The work was assigned to two icon-painting teams led by two masters. One of them worked in the entire altar section, the eastern transept and the eastern section of the central aisle. The other one painted the central and the western parts of the three aisles as well as all murals in the narthex. The boundary between the two areas of work is easily noticeable and can be traced out in the bottom two registers of the naos. The differences in the two parts are both stylistic and paleographic. The participation of Mihail of Linotopi as the chief icon-painter as suggested by some researchers, is not confirmed. Probably he participated as an assistant to the chief master who worked in the western part of the naos and in the narthex. The person who led the mural painting work in the altar and in the eastern part of the naos may be identified as one of the masters who did the frescoes in Dobarsko and in the Seslavtsi Monastery.
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The business activity of religious organizations and their economic relations with otherbusiness agents (households, companies, the state) have been poorly studied but from aresearch perspective they represent an exceptionally interesting field for analysis. Thepurpose of this study is to substantiate the theoretical basics of church economy and doan empirical analysis on its functioning and its mechanism of action. At the same time,the study will also search for confirmation of the following research thesis: namely, thatchurch economy is an important element of national economy, creating GDP and generatingcertain employment and as such, on the basis of existing theoretical concepts, wewill define it and determine its components and peculiarities, which will serve for thecreation of a methodological model of its measurement and evaluation.The categories of economics of religion and religious economics (economics of religiousactivity) have been defined on the basis of the theoretical-analytical approach, andthe different in meaning term "church economy" has been introduced, which gives usthe opportunity to encompass the overall religious activity in its social-economic aspect.The data about the social-economic activity of the church are, first and foremost, limitedand unreliable. Official statistics collect a very limited circle of information about theactivity of religious organizations. Despite this restrictive parameter, the first attempt inBulgarian economic literature for a theoretical-empirical analysis of church economy hasbeen made.
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The article focuses on problems relating to the Jewish community’s origin in medieval Tarnovo, the reasons that provoked the Bulgarian-Jewish conflict from the 1350ies and its aftermaths. The hypothesis that Tarnovo Jews originated from Byzantine and appeared in medieval Bulgarian capital at the end of the 12th century as manufacturers of silk is proposed. The religious clash from the 1350ies is ascribed to the influence exerted by some Talmudic anti-Christian texts on the local Jewish community, to the broken inner status-quo between Christians and Jews after the second marriage of the Bulgarian tsar Ivan Alexander and to the reactions of part of the Christian population against the breach of this status-quo.
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The town Razgrad from today was established in the XV century on a early Thracian, Roman and Bulgarian settlement. During the Renaissance and the period from the middle of the XIX century Bulgarians in Razgrad created their own municipality and joined the struggle for church independence and establishing a new school. In 1860 was built the current church "St.Nikolai" and the authority of the Ecumenical Patriarchate was rejected. For the educational and spiritual development of the city worked many of the citizens from whom more notable were S. Petrov, D. Hranov, A. Tsanov, N. Georgieva and others.
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