Crossing Cultural and Religious Frontiers in Early Modern Balkan Art
The progressive establishment of the Ottoman state in the Balkans, which started in the second half of the 14th century, introduced visual cultures, architectural paradigms and techniques that were either unseen, long forgotten or inaccessible to the large part of local society. Depending on the geopolitical importance of an area and the means of conquest of the cities situated within it, either peacefully or violently, Ottoman authority, cultural and economic agendas manifested differently. Scholarship has long neglected how early crosspollination between the local artistic production and the material culture and monumental art sponsored by the new elites occurred. This presentation shall investigate the process, actors, pace and context of these entanglements by looking at objects, wall-paintings and architecture produced in the 15th and 16th centuries for the Christian and Muslim communities in several Balkan cities. By doing so, we shall share preliminary results of an on-going four-year research project “The Interconfessional Dialogue of Buildings: Religious Architecture of the Urban and Peri-Urban Space in Macedonia and Western Thrace in the Long 15th Century (2020–2024)”, which is supported by the École française d’Athènes and the Louvre Museum.
Lilyana Yordanova is curator of the Slavic collections at the Department of Byzantine and Eastern Christian Arts at the Louvre Museum. She is also a member of the Research Unit UMR 8167 Orient et Méditerranée with the French National Research Center (CNRS). Yordanova was a fellow of the École française d’Athènes from 2020 to 2023, after receiving her PhD in Art History and Archaeology of the Byzantine and Post-Byzantine World from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 2020. Her research focuses on artistic and cultural exchanges between Byzantium, Slavic states
and the Ottomans in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. Together with Dr. Olivier Delouis (CNRS, Maison française d’Oxford), she coordinates the five-year research programme From Byzantium to the Ottoman World (BYOSE, 2022–2026), supported by the EfA, the Louvre and the MfO.