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VLADIMIR P. GOSS

Professor Emeritus

University of Rijeka

Croatia

The Pre-Romanesque Art of Pagan Slavs?

More on what Josef Strzygowski did not know

What is Art?

Incorporation of Spirit in inert matter. It makes the intangible tangible,

available for scrutiny by our senses – of sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste,

and the sense of motion and space. There is no art without form, i.e., the

solid matter. There is no art without the act of creativity endowing the Mat-

ter with the Spirit.

We live in the eternal space. It can change but it never disappears. It repre-

sents natural ecology, the eternal natural heritage. As soon as the Spirit

touches Nature, Nature changes into Culture, natural landscape into cultur-

al. Only when the Matter and Sprit, Nature and Culture, are joined, our

space makes sense. Matter is to Spirit what Form is to Content, as Spirit

makes the Matter specific, endowed with sense, content, emotion – en-

dowed with meaning.1

1 Vladimir P. GOSS, Two Saint Georges and the Earliest Slavic Cultural Landscape

between the Drava and the Sava Rivers, in: Peristil 51 (2008), pp. 7-28, here 23-25;

IDEM, Razbijanje porodičnog kristala: hrvatska kulturna ekologija pred vratima

Europske unije, in: Hrvatski identitet, Romana HORVAT, ed., Zagreb 2011, pp. 287-

302, here 287-290; IDEM, Tea GUDEK, Some Very Old Sanctuaries and the Emer-

gence of Zagreb's Cultural Landscape, in: Peristil 52 (2009), pp. 7-26, here 8-11,

Arthur Danto, Chicago 2003, pp. 139-142.

3

The universally accepted concept of “art” history in its standard designa-

tion of fine or visual or spatial arts – architecture, sculpture, painting…, is

simply wrong, as there is One Art bringing together into one unique experi-

ence all the areas open to our senses. Thus when I write “Art” I mean ex-

actly that total creative phenomenon, along with the experiencing thereof.2

If “Art” requires amendments so also does “History.” Needless to say, there

are activities which explore historical dimensions of art phenomenon, but

this is just one aspect of art studies. The key aspect of art studies is the

“Critica d’arte,” judging how successful a certain art phenomenon is, or

was, in conveying the spirit. Erwin Panofsky was right in stating that Art

History (i.e. visual arts history) as a humanist discipline is a continuous line

of endless reinterpretations the eventual goal being seeking wisdom – ap-

plicable to all humanist disciplines – as opposed to hard sciences seeking

practical application. We can close the entire circle by reiterating that Stud-

ies of Art as well as other humanist disciplines study the revelations of

Spirit.3

How did Art come into being?

I am sure there are numerous and various models, but in essence they all

boil down to the same – recognizing a pattern of special spiritual quality

impressing itself upon the receiver’s own spirit, and then presenting it to

the less sensitive public. On a sunny summer morning, the Artist – the seer,

augur, medicine man – summoned his flock to a hill above the huts. He

turned toward the neat pyramidal peak shimmering in the morning mist,

and exclaimed. “See that Mountain!? This is where your Gods live. We

will call it Olympus (or Pirin, Kailes…).” By pointing he created an image

centered on the peak (Today he would have taken a snapshot and made a

record of the view, but the Pre-Historic eye acted exactly as a contem-

porary camera). By naming the peak and by clasping his hands he created

the arts of sound – literature and music, by hopping rhythmically, the arts

motion – dance. Mother Nature added her own: the wind rubbed the naked

2 Vladimir P. GOSS, An Introduction to Cultural Ecology, Zagreb 2014.

3 Vladimir P. GOSS, Monuments of Art History as Historical Documents, in:

Medioevo: Monumenti e storia, A.C. QUINTAVALLE, ed., Parma 2007, here pp.

458f.; Erwin PANOFSKY, Studies in Iconology¸ Garden City 1955, p. 10.

4

skin, brought in the smell of wild strawberries, which made the mouth wa-

ter. All that created an experience of space linking the standing point of the

group and the peak, whereas the enveloping foil included the light, the air,

the warmth of the sun, the sound of the wind, the shuffling of the feet...4

Such units of cultural landscape as the one just described would most likely

have centered on the key elements of one’s life and survival, such as the

residence, eternal home, sources of food, and the perpetuation of the race.

Long before the Roman augur, the prehistoric seer-artist did a compre-

hensive ecological analysis of air, water, soil by watching the birds fly, the

winds change, the entrails of a slaughtered animal telling him of their

health. Then he looked for the orienting spots in the landscape that would

insure protection and security. If in all that his spirit made a successful con-

tact with the Good Spirit of the Place, it would have been safe to settle.

You can construct many stories of your own, but the basic pattern would

not differ. By the time of the cave painting the Artist did not limit himself

to pointing and naming, but he created his own images. By the same time

he must have composed also his own poems, dances, and songs.5

Many would exclaim: “This is not art!” Indeed phenomena as above are

relegated to the world of the folklore, the primitives, the exotica. Art should

have been something else. I would however claim that the performance by

the medicine man was as much art as a work by Praxiteles, Titian, or Frank

Lloyd Wright. What has happened?

Watching the medicine man, somebody soon realized that being with the

Spirit (Force) entails certain prestige. So those who yearned for prestige

and had the means (power) to seek it subverted the Art and the medicine

man. They clothed the power they usurped into the shiny aureole of the

Spirit, themselves claiming the seat of the Divine. The seer realized that

some of the prestige would rub off also at him, bringing along very tangible

material rewards. The new elite of Power and Spirit kidnapped the Art to

use it as means of enhancing the position of the ruling class, be it in terms

of political, be it in terms of commercial, intellectual, or any other power

which could be wielded within a society. Art became a part of the propa-

4 GOSS, Cultural Ecology /note 2/.

5 GOSS, GUDEK, Some Very Old Sanctuaries /note 1/, 22-23.

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ganda department and, as a good civil servant, stuck to political correct-

ness, expressing the views of those who had the power and resources to de-

clare what is politically correct. In that nothing has changed from the earli-

est elites until today. In this process the Art became precious, as it was

made by costly specialists, involved great expense of time, and great mone-

tary investment, and so also it became an important area of trade. The elite

decided what the Art was, the rest became folk, exotic, rural, naïve, non-

western… you name it, and it was handed over to ethnology and cultural

anthropology. Opposition and dissenting movements, if strong enough to

afford Art, acted in the same way. The Amarna period in Egypt had its own

art orthodoxy which was duly swept aside when the old political orthodoxy

returned to power.

If the artist of creating joined the elite, the artist of experiencing did not lag

much behind. His role was to praise the works of art praising those who

had commissioned them. Today we call those interpretation specialists crit-

ics or art students and scholars. Since the early modern scions of the trade,

such as Aretino, they have been among the most corrupt people in the

world. As they were tied with the established elites it was necessary that

they conform to the ways and means of those elites; it is no wonder that

this group (“the art historians”) is still largely enlisted from the ranks of the

elites – rich, spoiled kids, hungering for power, prestige, and money, igno-

rant, or at best fachidiot blindly and jealously claiming the tiny turf in

which they consider themselves universally omniscient. No wonder again

that the “profession” has no professional standards, or, that those are de-

fined as what a certain establishment at some point deems professional.

Dissenting voice in scholarship, and so also in art, is not allowed – until

and unless the trend, the fashion, the policy changes. Then the dissenting

voice may become the establishment and silence all other dissenting voices.

Or if somebody or something is too dangerous to the accepted truth,

he/she/it is simply ignored.6

6 GOSS, Cultural Ecology /note 2/. The line of thinking about the nature of art finds a

surprising and worthy parallel in the novel My Name is Red by the Nobel Prize win-

ner Orhan PAMUK, published in 1998. The references here are made to the Croatian

translation by E. Čaušević and M. Andrić, Zovem se crvena, Zagreb 2004. The en-

tire book is a mine of wisdom concerning the Art by an intelligent and highly sensi-

tive non-expert. See in particular p. 284 (art and power), p. 311 and 332-333 (the na-

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Let me make it abundantly clear that I do not claim that a hopping seer is a

greater artist than Picasso. They both have their place in the chain of events

and objects capturing the Spirit in the inert matter, which is the task of the

artists of experience to judge and define. There is no high and low, courtly

and folk, urban and rural, western and non-western art. Just art and non-art

based on whether the Spirit is captured and conveyed or not.7

All those and similar distinctions were imposed since the day some of the

seers were invited to become servants to the elite. They hold still today,

meaning that the majority of art manifestations are excluded from Art. Our

present day West European art studies suffer from monofocality, elitism,

and national and religious exclusivism. Having said that let me assert that

the art of today in its core is neither any different nor better or worse than

the art of any other period. There is “mainstream,’ “thrash,” “kitsch,” “the

vanguard,” “the reactionary,” there is figured and abstract, narrative and

decorative, bearing in mind that none of the designations means much and

that what is “progressive” today may be “retrograde” tomorrow. Of course

these designations serve the purpose of eliminating what the ruling elite

sees as politically incorrect, i.e., not serving their purposes and/or grand

commercial schemes of establishment’s art dealers. Thus the art allowed to

be studied and praised in any period has nothing to do with the actual art

output of the time. Simply, the picture of any art period is skewed and in-

complete. This is also true of the present day art predicament?8

Why am I bothering you with all that?

Because about 100 years ago an art scholar called Josef Strzygowski dared

to declare that there is also art outside Western Europe, as well as unrecog-

nized non-mainstream art within it. Strzygowski was a restless soul, an

eternal traveler in fact and spirit. Had he only published the visual records

ture of art), 420-421 (differences between the high West European and the Asian or,

in general, for a Westerner non-mainstream art, which would have delighted

Strzygowski).

7 GOSS, Monuments /note 3/, 458-459; IDEM, Cultural Ecology /note 2/.

8 Vladimir P. GOSS, Art and Political Correctness, in: Ikon 5 (2012), pp. 9-13, here

12-13. IDEM, Toward a multi focal vision of European culture. Discovering the Ear-

ly Slavic Cultural Landscape in Croatia, in: Proceedings of the Conference “Herit-

age Reinvents Europe”, Ename 2010 [in press]

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of his adventures in the Near East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Balkans,

in Northern and Eastern Europe he would have come dangerously close to

breaking the monofocality of the prevailing view of European culture,

based on an elitist view of the superiority of the West, itself based on the

culture of the Mediterranean classical Antiquity; an urban and courtly cul-

ture building upon an urban and courtly predecessor. What Strzygowski

confronted with the enraged and offended “Humanists”, the proponents of

the “Rome is everything” view of European cultural history was, one might

say today, another, unrecognized and repressed cultural landscape; of the

vast expanses of Asia, of the Altay and Iran, of the steppes and their rest-

less nomadic riders, of the Central Asians, Germans, and the Slavs, those

barbarians watching from outside the limes of the classical world to, final-

ly, break into it, desecrate it, and destroy; so thoroughly it took a millenni-

um to truly restore both political and cultural order.9 And at the same time

Strzygowski, horribile dictu, attempted to demonstrate the relevance of that

cultural landscape for the European mainstream!

In that, curiously enough, Strzygowski had a worthy predecessor. Some-

time toward the end of Emperor Hadrian’s rule (117-138) Pausanias visited

Greece and wrote his famous Guide to Hellas, Periegesis tes Hallados.

Most of us, used to a vision of the bright and serene Classical Greece, can-

not but be struck by how little “classical” there is in that Pausanian Hellas;

and, on the contrary, how much of the prehistoric, mythical, irrational, bar-

barian. How much fascination with and reverence of shadowy, mysterious,

underground deities and rituals. To quote Uroš Pasini, the worthy Croatian

translator, Pausanias’ Greece is “still a pastoral land of modest roads and

soft mountain trails, of clear waters and coastline, a land of well-walled in

towns, full of mysterious rituals, strange customs, and surprising prophe-

sies.” To the world of the metropolitan Roman urbs, Pausanias revealed the

world of the eternal rus. Almost two millennia later, another great traveler

revealed to his own contemporaries a world few of them would have ever

dreamed of.10

9 GOSS, Toward a multi focal vision /see note 8

10 Pauzanija, Vodič po Heladi, Uroš Pasini (editor and translator), Split 2008, pp. 7-12.

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Today, a hundred some years after the eruption of those fiery debates, one

can approach the issue in a much cooler mode. Strzygowski was right in

terms of his intuition. That “other” cultural landscape was there. Methodo-

logical consequences of such a stance will be discussed later, as extremely

relevant for the research presented in these lines, including where

Strzygowski failed to back up his insights with facts which would lead to

firmer scholarly results. He had taken just a glimpse at the world he wanted

to study, a tiny bit of an enormous body of material which had been poorly

known, and still today leaves us with many a puzzle and lacuna. In fact, as

we shall see, the more limited and better defined the topic and the field, the

closer Strzygowski came to the most modern and best integrated views of

art studies. Whereas the “Humanists” had done a great job in studying their

spheres, which was much easier as they dealt with the art close in space,

relatively easily available, mostly “realistic”, thus easy to read, reasonably

well preserved and apparently easy to classify, Strzygowski and his follow-

ers faced a misty abyss threatening to swallow them, a labyrinth easy to get

lost in. And whereas the “Humanists” still hold the sway of European cul-

tural history, the “damage” wrought by Strzygowski could never be fully

repaired, as outstanding scholars trained in respected strongholds of the

“Humanism” started dealing with “marginal” phenomena – Gabriel Mil-

let’s école Grecque, Jurgis Baltrusaitis and his recognition of the oriental

réveils et prodiges; in the art of the western Middle Ages, Arthur K. Por-

ter’s revelations concerning the “suspect” style of the Romanesque, and of

the prodiges of the Celtic Ireland; the discovery of Mannerism, the reeval-

uation of Baroque, David Buxton’s studies of the wooden architecture of

the European East and Northeast – would any of these have been possible

without Josef Strzygowski’s making the first chinks in the “Humanist” ar-

mor? While not trying in any way to exonerate Strzygowski’s errors of fact

and sometimes overly combative approach, I believe it is legitimate to in-

quire what he would do knowing what we know today. And to reiterate, the

“Humanists” have kept doing a good job working on the material of their

choice. The “Barbarians” have lagged behind, but they have not sat still ei-

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ther. Yet, there is still a job to be done, and a better understanding of

Strzygowski’s contribution makes this job easier.11

Needless to say, no honest judgment of European culture today could leave

out either Humanists or Barbarians. Yet Euro-centrism, in particular the

heavy emphasis on the lands west of the Rhine, the Danube and the Adriat-

ic still prevails in studies of art and culture.

As a native of Southeastern Central Europe I have been appalled through-

out my career by the lack of interest in the rim lands of Europe by the

mainstream humanities research in the West. Take, for example, the map of

monuments of Pre-Romanesque architecture from an otherwise fine book

by Charles McClendon, The Origins of Medieval Architecture. There are

no monuments to the East of the line Halberstadt-San Vincenzo al

Volturno; whereas in truth there are some 400 such monuments in Croatia

only!12

We just pinpointed our first area of bias: mono-focality, identifying the

western part of Europe as the sole standard and locus of cultural excellence.

The second bias, elitism, is closely linked to the first, as visual arts history

is a notoriously elitist discipline, centering on “high culture” – courtly, ur-

ban, intellectual, rehashing ad nauseam “the 100 great monuments” at the

expense of everything else. Is it always “the center” that acts as the pace

setter? For example, decades of studying the rural Romanesque throughout

Europe have convinced me that the “rural” has its own means and ways of

expression, sometimes related to the “high,” and sometimes not. It is fasci-

nating to see how some standard types of rural Romanesque architecture,

11 Another wonderful parallel has been drawn by Milan Pelc in the oral version of his

paper for the Strzygowski conference, based upon another great writer, Thomas

Mann and his Magic Mountain, where the author rightly singles out one of the pro-

tagonists, Settembrini, as an embodiment of a “humanist,” and another one, Naphta,

as a “barbarian.” I thank Professor Pelc for letting me consult the oral version of his

paper. I am using here the term “Humanist” in Strzygowski’s sense – a scholar

steeped in study of Classical antiquity and biased in terms of its influence on later

art and culture. Of course, if we strip the word of the inverted comma we all, dealing

in the Humanities, are Humanists in the best and most positive sense of the word.

12 Charles B. MCCLENDON, The Origins of Medieval Architecture, New Haven 2005,

map 3; Tomislav MARASOVIĆ, Dalmatia Praeromanica, 4. vols. (3 so far), Zagreb

2008-

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e.g., the “zusammengestzter Raum,” the rounded tower, and the “Frisian”

décor, appear systematically from Scandinavia to Kosovo, and from Frisia

to Transylvania. It is equally sobering to note that another rural type – that

of an aisleless church with a rectangular sanctuary – need not have ap-

peared solely as a result of the spread of the Cistercian order – a frequently

voiced opinion – as precedents had existed, both in wood and permanent

materials, for centuries before the funding of the Order.13

Elitism is intimately tied with national exclusivism. Find me a survey of

European art which includes serious views on the art of the Scandinavians,

the Slavs, or the European nations of Asian origin, e.g., the Hungarians.

Our common view of the European heritage is that it was generated in Paris

with some contributions by London, Madrid, and Rome. Remember Ne-

ville Chamberlain who in 1938, when asked about selling the Czechs to

Hitler, responded: “Why bother about people about whom we know noth-

ing.”

National exclusivism goes hand in hand with the religious one. I quote

words of a Croatian Catholic priest to a pioneer of the study of the pagan

Slavic heritage in Croatia, then young Vitomir Belaj: “Forget this, and find

yourself a more useful occupation!” Other “established” religions and ideo-

logies have done no better. Dynamiting rocks associated with the pagan

past had been practiced in the former Yugoslavia even under com-

munism!14

While confronting the bias of western Euro-centrism Strzygowski was cer-

tainly an anti-elitist. Consequently he was also opposed to national or reli-

gious exclusivism, in fact he promoted the art of some repressed people

such as the Armenians, Croats or Finns, or of the remaining enclaves of

Asia’s Christians. The art of the Pagans, Moslems and Buddhists also ap-

pears within the covers of his books – as relevant for the European cultural

13

GOSS, Monuments /note 3/, 458f.; IDEM, Vjekoslav JUKIĆ, Rural Romanesque and a

Europe without Borders – The Case of St. Mark's Church in Vinica, in: Hortus

artium medievalium 14 (2008), pp. 133-140, here 133-135; IDEM, Nina ŠEPIĆ, A

Note on Some Churches with Rectangular Sanctuary in Medieval Slavonia, in:

Peristil 50 (2007), pp. 21-40, here 22-28.

14 GOSS, Toward a multi focal vision /see note 8/.

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predicament. Using contemporary terminology, Strzygowski’s work was

not politically correct.15

Strzygowski’s influence on my own work has been far-reaching. Some of it

I would like to share with you in the brief outline that follows. I can not

claim to be a Strzygowski expert. Much of what he said has remained for

me difficult to understand or accept. Yet, there is in my opinion hardly a

humanities scholar who has done so much. My intention in writing these

lines is to show the living tradition of the positive aspects of Strzygowski’s

work by proposing to identify the traces of what I call the Pre-Romanesque

Art of Pagan Slavs.16

The huge area of Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe predominantly

inhabited by the Slavs – from Polabia to Ukraine, and from Northern Rus-

sia to the Adriatic – has, in terms of art history, never been systematically

studied and what has been done, was done within the borders of several na-

tion-states. By carefully studying such materials as place names, personal

names and ethno-names in the entire Slavic area, and in the lands of the

Southern Slavs, and then comparing the findings with what can be found in

the entire area from the Elbe to the Volga, and from the Baltic to the Adri-

atic, it is even possible to pinpoint where the Slavic immigrants came from

as the western and eastern Slavic materials could be exactly matched

among the Southern Slavs. Language is to culture what genetics is to na-

ture. And its evidence is peremptory.17

This evidence tells us that there ex-

isted a linguistic unity, or, maybe, a high degree of linguistic similarity in

that huge area mentioned above. If language is a marker of cultural genet-

ics, so also are ideology and material and spiritual culture. Thus it would be

legitimate that we could, while looking attentively at the lands of the

Southern Slavs, recall comparative materials from other areas of the

15

GOSS, Art and Political Correctness /note 8/, 9-10.

16 Vladimir P. GOSS, Josef Strzygowski and Early Medieval Art in Croatia, in: Acta

historiae artium 47 (2006), pp. 335-343; IDEM, What Josef Strzygowski did not

know, in: Immagine e Ideologia – Studi in onore di Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Parma

2007, pp. 583-593.

17 Vladimir P. GOSS, The Three-Header from Vaćani, in: Starohrvatska prosvjeta 36

(2009), pp. 35-51, here 40.

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“Slavdom,” as an initial step toward a comprehensive discussion of that

pre-Christian art of the Slavs and their historical co-travelers.18

Here I am well aware that by doing this, I am running a risk of making a

fool of myself. I am not particularly well informed about some of the mate-

rial I will consider, and some of my conclusions may be questionable. As I

kept revising this text it in fact occurred to me that I was in a position of

Josef Strzygowski when facing newly recognized monuments of the Chris-

tian Near East, Asia Minor, and the Caucasus. It has also occurred to me

that the methodology of research I am about to describe owes a lot to

Strzygowski’s tradition. I do hope for constructive criticism from the read-

ers, and for their amendments to what I am about to say. I consider the top-

ic to be of extreme importance, particularly in the light of the extension of

the United Europe toward the East and South East, which as I will argue,

has not been accompanied by comparable moves in humanist scholarship.

To define the thrust of my argument I invite you to again take a look at the

map of Pre-Romanesque architecture from Charles McClendon’s book. As

already said, there are no monuments to the east of the line Halberstadt-San

Vincenzo al Volturno. Yet, in the coastal part of Croatia alone there are

some 400 Pre-Romanesque buildings as shown by the newest catalogues!19

In pursuing our goal we shall use data from the project entitled “The Rom-

anesque between the Sava and the Drava Rivers and European Culture”,

launched by the Ministry of Science of the Republic of Croatia in 2003 un-

der the leadership of the writer of theses lines and brought to a successful

conclusion in 2012.

When we started out there were in Continental Croatia about 60 recorded

monuments of earlier medieval art (up to ca. 1300). We hoped to add a few

monuments to the list, and to thoroughly study what had been known. Eight

years later we handed to a publisher a new list which contains 565 sites (!),

i.e., close to 1000 individual monuments, as a fair number of sights sport

more than one monument!

18

Ibid., 46-47.

19 See MARASOVIĆ, Dalmatia Praeromanica /note 12/.

13

We quickly realized that standard methods would not work. Written

sources were scanty and unreliable, archeological activities inadequate.20

Most of the key monuments known from traces or sources had never been

excavated, and no major investigations were planned. Literature was not

negligible, but it was scattered and uncoordinated. However, as we moved

along through bushes and marshes we started to notice and record patterns

of territorial organization. Needless to say, we have made many a mistake,

some corrected, some certainly still to be corrected. But a general picture of

a cultural landscape of the period between ca. 1100 and 1300 started to

emerge.

Let me try to further clarify what I mean by “cultural landscape.” Very

briefly, it is a layer of cultural ecology. And what is cultural ecology? It is a

total of human intervention into natural ecology; with which it makes the

total ecology. We have already seen that as soon as a human being sets its

eye on nature, the nature turns into culture. Cultural ecology does not in-

volve just material interventions, but also spiritual ones. These are the “in-

tangibles of history” beautifully recognized and analyzed by Ernst

Kitzinger, and the Art is a supreme record of those intangibles.21

If we define cultural landscapes as “layers” one may legitimately ask: don’t

we already deal with them under the term of “style.” Yet, style is a bunch

of recipes in a cookbook manufactured by the mortals to define modes of

expression and communication of a period, place, or a group. As any hu-

man activity happens in space, which exercises its own influence on cultur-

al activity, cultural landscapes have a firm base of permanence in, yes,

changeable, but eternal space. Cultural landscape is more than a style – it is

tied to an eternal factor, the space, which may change but it never disap-

pears providing stability for our finite efforts. Throughout history the space

has become a repository of all human activities, and their traces never

completely disappear. Our environment is a huge book of history, and we

20 Vladimir P. GOSS, A Reemerging World – Prolegomena to an Introduction to Earli-

er Medieval Art Between the Sava and the Drava Rivers, in: Starohrvatska prosvjeta

III/32 (2006), pp. 91-112.

21 Ernst KITZINGER, The Gregorian Reform and the Visual Arts: A Problem of Method,

in: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 22 (1972), pp. 57-102, here 99-102.

14

just have to learn how to read it in order to uncover the hidden traces and

lost monuments of the past. Obviously, cultural landscapes can not be pre-

served as they keep changing permanently. But in the process of change we

may try to make them more attractive, more sensible and more apt for hu-

man life, something which we should learn from studying the lessons of

history and reconstructing old functioning cultural landscapes. And let me

reiterate: not only physical but also their spiritual ingredients.22

As we proceeded with our project we learned how to read and interpret the

environment and this was a huge help in our effort. In retrospect, and I will

return to the point later, this multidisciplinary acknowledgement of the sig-

nificance of both the natural and spiritual context, was anticipated by

Strzygowski when facing new challenges in Asia Minor or in the Caucasus,

and, later, in Croatia. Also, much to our surprise, it seemed that traces of an

even earlier cultural layer lurked in the background – a place name here, an

ethno-name there, a cluster of names forming a pattern in the landscape.

We took notice and started compiling the facts. At this point I can try to

sum up, only in the briefest way possible, the findings and propose some

temporary conclusions dividing them as follows: patterns in space, signifi-

cant place names, material witnesses, survivals. Providing conclusive evi-

dence leading to an intelligent scholarly discourse is still a rather distant

goal, but the body of facts – the evidence – is growing. And I dare say that

it would have delighted Professor Strzygowski.

1. Patterns of space

That place names constitute an important evidence in historical studies is

nothing new. The areas inhabited by Southern Slavs are full of places bear-

ing old Slavic references – names of gods, of rituals, of old obsolete words

long gone from the language, etc. What, however, has been done over the

last two decade, was to stop seeing place names in isolation, but to relate

them within a system. This was made possible by the research of the Rus-

22 GOSS, Two Saint Georges /note 1/, 23-25; IDEM, Landscape as History, Myth, and

Art. An Art Historian’s View, in: Studia Ethnologica Croatica 21 (2009), pp. 133-

166, here 134-143.

15

sian scholars, Ivanov and Toporov, who, some forty years ago, recognized

structural relationships between the elements, and thus enabled researchers

to establish the importance of certain points in the landscape. It became

possible to recognize the essential elements of the fundamental myth cen-

tering on the clash between Perun, the thunder-god, whose place is “up

there,” on a mountain, and Veles, the snake, the god of the “down there,”

the world and the underworld, who is chased back by Perun’s lightnings in-

to the depths of the water whenever he dares attempt to climb the moun-

tain. The interested reader is referred to anthropological literature for de-

tails of the myth which is common to many groups of both Indo-European

and Non-Indo-European nations, and has even pre-Indo-European roots;

naturally, it is related to the cycle of the year, the change of seasons, and

rituals contained therein. In a nutshell, Perun’s son, Juraj/Jarylo is abducted

by Veles’s agents in the dead of winter, and spends his youth as a shepherd

of Veles’s wolves. He escapes, crosses the river, changes his name to Ivan,

and at mid-summer marries his sister, Mara/Morana. He is unfaithful to

her, and is killed to be born again in the midst of winter. And so on, year in,

year out. An additional bone of contention between the Thunderer and the

Snake is Perun’s wife, Mokoš, who spends half of a year with her husband,

and another half with her lover, the god of the underworld.23

I apologize to

my anthropologist colleagues for this drastic oversimplification.24

The outstanding Croatian linguist, Radoslav Katičić25

, has identified sever-

al “stages” where the segments of the myth are played out, including place

names such as Perun, Perunsko (Perun’s place), Vidova gora (St. Vid’s

Mountain), Gora (Montain), as opposed to Veles, Volosko (Veles’s place),

Dol (Hollow). Between them there may be an oak forest, Dubrava, Dubac,

where the conflict between Perun and Veles takes place. Building upon

Katičić’s insights, the Slovene archeologist, Andrej Pleterski, Croatian eth-

nologist and cultural anthropologist, Vitomir Belaj, and his son, archeolo-

23 Vitomir BELAJ, Hod kroz godinu, Zagreb 2007, pp. 420-424.

24 For rich lists of bibliography on cultural anthropology and linguistics please see the

works by V. Belaj and Katičić.

25 Radoslav KATIČIĆ, Božanski boj, Zagreb 2008; IDEM, Zeleni lug, Zagreb 2010;

IDEM, Gazdarica na vratima, Zagreb 2011.

16

gist Juraj Belaj started searching for patterns within such clusters of place

names.26

The conclusion, by V. Belaj, is as follows: “These are not just

points in the landscape any more (...). Mythically interpreted landscape

transforms itself into an ideogram, read by those who within the culture

were trained to do so. As ideogram is in fact script, the structured points in

the landscape represent a written source about the early Slavic paganism.”27

Or, it is a work of art, of (oral) literature, and of visual images.28

The pattern that has emerged is that of a sacred triangle the characteristics

of which are: of the three points usually in a visual contact with one anoth-

er, two are occupied by male deities (Perun, Veles; Juraj), and the third by

Mokoš (fig. 1, 3, 10, 11); one of the angles measures ca. 23 degrees (repre-

senting the deflection between the imagined orbits of the Sun at the equi-

nox and the solstice, in Croatia 23 degrees 27 minutes; the two longer sides

form a ratio of 1 to square root of 2; the longest side usually links the two

key opponents; Perun’s point is always on elevated ground; the female

point is usually next to water; there is usually water between Mokoš and

Veles.29

Elements of the myth and its representation could be considered pre-Indo-

European. In conclusion, V. Belaj underlines the tremendous, practical,

impact of the “myth in the landscape.”

“There is something even more important. The incorporation of the myth

into the newly occupied territories was, obviously, an essential part of mak-

ing the new land one’s own (...). This is what us, who live here nowadays,

albeit we have been blown together by many a wind of history, makes in a

mythical and ritual way its legitimate owners.”30

26

BELAJ, Hod kroz godinu /note 23/; Juraj BELAJ, Templari i Ivanovci na zemlji Sv.

Martina, Dugo selo 2007; Mateja BELAK, Andrej PLETERSKI (eds.), Sporočila

prostora, Ljubljana 2008; Vladimir P. GOSS, Predromanika i romanika, in: B. ŠULC

and V. KUSIN (ed.), Slavonija, Baranja i Srijem – vrela europske civilizacije, vol. 1

(exhibition catalogue), Zagreb 2009, pp. 286-293.

27 BELAJ, Hod kroz godinu /note 23/, 453.

28 On evaluating oral tradition and its significance as history please see Jan Vansina,

Madison 1985.

29 BELAJ, Hod kroz godinu /note 23/, 423f..

30 Ibid., 454.

17

Fig. 1. The Sacred Triangle of Zagreb, according to V. Belaj,

expanded by GOSS and GUDEK (Some Very Old Sanctuaries/note 1/).

If the view of the “myth in the landscape” is correct than, first of all, the

Croats, and the other Southern Slavs, brought along to the Roman and

Greek world within which they had settled a fairly sophisticated culture.

They imprinted some of its essential mythical features on the new land in

the process of taking it, and thus perpetuated some of their deepest experi-

ences about the self and the world. They re-made the picture of their old

country. It would be foolish to assert that a nation capable of doing that,

immediately forgot everything about their artistic practices, although they

18

had moved from a land of wood to a land of stone, from a land of wood-

building and carving, to a land of building and carving in permanent mate-

rials, from a land of a rural organization to a land of highly developed ur-

banization. Finally, from the world of paganism which they projected on

their environment, to a land of Jesus Christ who very soon asked them to

become His faithful followers, what they duly did, while retaining some of

their pre-Christian lore until today.31

Fig. 2. St. Jacob’s and Medvedgrad from the Upper Town of Zagreb

(GOSS, JUKIĆ, photo archives)

31

GOSS, Landscape as History /note 22/, 155-156.

19

Fig. 3. The Sacred Triangle of the Western Papuk, according to V. Belaj.

Many objections could and have been raised to the sacred triangle theory.

Obviously some of the triangles that the Belajs and Pleterski have proposed

work better than others. But one thing is certain: The Slavs have imposed

their place names on their new surroundings with an obvious intention to

orient themselves and to set roots in the new environment. There may be

other patterns besides the triangles. Let us take an example. Vitomir Belaj

has proposed a triangle ruling one of the most important cultural landscapes

of Croatia, that of the Zagreb Piedmont. At the peak of St. Jacob’s of the

Zagreb Mountain he has placed Perun, in the marshes across the Sava River

at the village of Županići (župan’s, i.e., count’s village) Veles, while

Mokoš would, by the dictate of geometry, find herself a place at the church

of St. Mark’s right in the heart of the medieval Upper Town of Zagreb!

Moreover, the line St. Jacob – Upper Town passes through another histori-

cally very significant spot, the castle of Medvedgrad, in today’s form

stemming from the first half of the 13th

ct. Thus the axis St. Jacob-

20

Medvedgrad-St. Mark’s imposes itself as an extremely important feature of

the Zagreb landscape32

(fig. 1, 2).

Fig. 4. The Main Territorial Axes of the Zagreb Piedmont,

according to GOSS and GUDEK (Some Very Old Sanctuaries /note 1/).

32

Vitomir BELAJ, Sacred Tripartite Structures in Croatia, in: Mojca MENCELJ (ed.),

Space and Time in Europe, Ljubljana 2008, pp. 305-320, here 309f.

21

A young colleague and myself tried to extend that line, with some surpris-

ing results (fig. 4). Going further toward the Southeast it passes through the

village of Jakuševec, another Jacob’s place, and if extended toward North-

west through yet another one, the village of Jakovlje, and next through a

place called Igrišče, i.e., the place of rituals, ritual dances. So far we have

gone no further out, as this in itself confirmed the said line as the key de-

terminant of the Zagreb Piedmont space. Then, we decided to find out if

this line has its counterpart running through St. Mark’s from the Northeast

to Southwest. Looking for a potentially significant spot, we drew a line

from St. Mark’s to the famous pilgrimage place of St. Mary at Marija

Bistrica, beyond the Zagreb Mountain, and then looked at place names on

or close by the line. The line went between the peaks of Lipa (Linden, a

Slavic sacred tree) and Rog (Horn, associated with devil and his predeces-

sor, Veles), and then through a peak called Stari kip (The Old Statue or Im-

age), most likely a place of some old pre-Christian – pre-Slavic or Slavic –

image. The fact that the lines intersect at the square of St. Mark’s, where,

among other things, the Croatian parliament still sits today, must mean

something in terms of their importance for the territorial organization of the

Zagreb Piedmont space!33

Also, one may make a fairly good guess what the “triangles” seek to define

– the area of an old Slavic territorial unit – a župa. One may imagine the

žrec, the Slavic seer, medicine man, or augur pointing out the spots in the

landscape while reiterating the words of the myth. We have already seen

that, as his Roman successor, the augur tasted the water, smelled the air,

performed some other tests/sacrifices, briefly, he did an ecological analysis

of the area considered for permanent settlement. If the place passed his

scrutiny, he would identify the sacred spots (the Roman orientatio) that

would protect the area within and around the triangle which provided what

the act of linitatio did for the Romans. The difference is that in Rome the

33 GOSS, GUDEK, Some Very Old Sanctuaries /note 1/, 18-21. Another young colleague

of mine, Sanja BERNARD, has pointed out to me that Jacob/James occurs often at

mountain tops as a memory of the Old Testament’s Jacob’s ladder. She is in the pro-

cess of publishing her discovery.

22

outcome was an urbs quadrata, as a hub of a centripetal (urban-centered)

spatial organization, whereas in the early Slavic case it was a centrifugal

territorial organization built up from small and scattered settlement units,

individual farms or small clusters thereof; or, exactly the type of territorial

organization which we find in the rural areas of South-Central Europe,

where it was carefully studied in Transylvania, and attributed to the Slavs

and the native rural population of the Roman period; or which could be

gleaned from the size and distribution of the earliest both pagan and Chris-

tian Croatian cemeteries (7th

through early 9th

ct.) – small burial areas asso-

ciated with equally small and scattered units of settlement. Here is a vast

area of future interdisciplinary study, but now we at least have some idea of

its framework.34

We have, I believe, added some very essential fundaments

to Josef Strzygowski’s thinking. Yes, there is a factual base for the cultural

landscape he had intuitively grasped, both in Croatia and elsewhere.

2. Significant place names

Here, we shall deal with two such names only. The dean of early Slavic

linguistics, Radoslav Katičić (Vienna) has identified in the Belarus folk po-

etry the place name “Budinjak” (Budiniak in Belarussian) as a hut in which

Veles hides when attacked by Perun’s lightning.35

Morena Želle recently

discovered traces of a tetraconch building at the Budinjak hill in the

Žumberak to the west of Zagreb. It was underneath a later Greek-Catholic

church of St. Petka, the saint which succeeds Mokoš in Eastern Christian

traditions. Do we have here the entire Slavic Trinity together – Veles hid-

ing in a Budinjak, Perun releasing his lightning, while Mokoš watches from

the sideline waiting for the outcome? Now, if the Slavs did not migrate

how to explain the appearance of the word “Budiniak” in two such distant

34 Hermann and Alida FABINI, Kirchenburgen un Siebenbürgen, Liepzig 1991, p. 53;

Bruno MILIĆ, Razvoj grada kroz stoljeća. Prapovijest – Antika, Zagreb 1994, pp.

181f.; Maja PETRINEC, Groblja od 8. do 11. stoljeća na području ranosrednjo-

vjekovne hrvatske države, Split 2009, pp. 271-277.

35 KATIČIĆ, Božanski boj / note 25/, 223; GOSS, Three-Header /note 17/, 45.

23

places as Belarus and Croatia? Used in a very similar mythical context! As

for the significance of tetraconchal form we shall return to it below.36

Another such name is Trem (Trema, Tremi), an old Slavic word signifying,

according to Katičić and Belaj, a big blockbau building, a distinguished

building, a tower. The meaning is close to words such as “hram,” and

“kreml.” Modern Croatian word is trijem (štokavian) and trem (kajkavian)

meaning a porch. A place called Trem or Trema would imply the presence

of a building (dvor, hall, hof) worthy of a chieftain. So far we have uncov-

ered five such locations in Continental Croatia.37

Fig. 5. Trema, View of St. George (GOSS, JUKIĆ, photo archives).

36

GOSS, Three-Header /note 17/, 45; Morena ŽELLE, Crkve dvaju katoličkih obreda u

Žumberku, in: Euro City – Putna revija 4 (2007), pp. 57f.; EADEM, Budinjak-kapela

Sv. Petke, in: Hrvatski arheološki godišnjak 3 (2007), pp. 170f.

37 GOSS, Two Saint Georges /note 1/, 17-22.

24

The most extensive is a small, closed high plateau called Trema surrounded

by hills to the east of Križevci (fig. 5). It is full of place names which can

be put together in a meaningful pattern according to the models offered by

cultural anthropologists. There are Dvori and Dvorišće (Court and Court-

yard), the place where the big log-built “Trem” would have stood, the seat

of the local lord, and, mythically speaking, the place where the marriage

between Juraj and Mara took place. To the northwest, beyond a low beam,

there is the hill of Đurđic with the church of St. Juraj (George) the tower of

which retains Romanesque details. The church stands on a hillfort, and to

the north there is an extensive cemetery with an excellent view of all of the

great mountains of northwestern Croatia – Kalnik, Ivanščica and Medved-

nica. The Ivanščica was a Perun place as demonstrated by the Belajs, the

significance of the Medvednica has already been discussed, the Kalnik is

unexplored but promising. Another church, of St. Juliana, for this part of

the world a very rare Netherlandish Saint, stands on another hillfort to the

southeast of Dvori/Dvorište. St. Juliana is a saint that triumphed over devil.

The church has been believed to be a 16th

ct. building, but a new, unauthor-

ized restoration produced a number of elements which may point to a much

earlier date. The third significant point is the Staro Brdo, the highest peak

in Trema (226m), with a great view toward the east and southeast, as far as

the Požega Mountains in Central Slavonia ca. 100 km away. That the name

of “Trema” referred to the entire plateau is revealed by the fact that a num-

ber of other places bear the prefix “Trema;” Trema-Budišovo, Trema-

Osuđevo, Trema-Pintići, Tremski Prkos, Tremske livade. Another interest-

ing name is Vražje oko (Devil’s Eye), on the beam between St. Juliana and

St. George, and also referring to the marshy land in the little valley to its

west.38

Vražje oko could be associated with Veles, but the Snake probably had its

main Trema apartments at Đurđic, where, subsequently, Veles was tamed

by St. George, the snake killer. St. Juliana who triumphed over devil could

have succeeded Mokoš. If planned investigations confirm our hopes we

might have at St. Juliana’s the first well-preserved Carolingian building in

38

GOSS, Three-Header /note 17/, 43-44; BELAJ, Sacred Tripartite Structures /note 32/,

138; BELAJ, Templari i Ivanovci /note 26/.

25

northwestern Croatia, bearing a dedication to a saint whose presence here

after the Carolingian period would not be very likely. Perun would have,

consequently, occupied the highest peak, the Staro Brdo (Old Mountain),

on the eastern slope of which one finds a deserted village with traces of a

circular building or area. It could be anything but it could be also a trace of

a sacred circle – only excavation might tell. But it is significant that right

opposite to the Trema hills, on the southern slope of the Kalnik we find two

more such circles, at Igrišče (another “Place of Rituals”), next to the ruins

of a church of St. Martin (Carolingian Saint), which appears to consist of

an elongated aisle (originally a hall?) and an added, polygonal (Gothic?)

sanctuary (fig. 6); and at Mihalj (St. Michael), at stone’s throw from an

enormous rectangular hillfort with rounded corners, accompanied by traces

of a square building (a hall again?). The circles do not seem to have been

fortifications as their walls are too thin, and they are in no particularly

meaningful relationship to the neighboring building, church or otherwise.

The same is true of another such odd couple, at SS. Kuzma and Damjan at

Kladeščica in the eastern Medvednica, and the circle at Pogano St. Peter at

the Western Papuk in Western Slavonia (fig. 7). Of course, only the shovel

can tell whether we are dealing with a Slavic sacred circle, or with a lime

pit or a coal maker hut.39

The view from the cemetery at Đurđic in spite of its low height (209m) is

fantastic and it may have been a relay point between two major systems of

significant points in space, of northwestern Croatia and central Slavonia.

The view from the top of the Staro Brdo may have been even better, but

nowadays it is obscured by the forest which covers the peak. The spot it

might have linked up to was another low, but strategically placed hill, once

the site of another church of St. George, at Đurđička Rudina west of

Daruvar, some 80km east of Đurđic. It has the view of the Medvednica,

Ivanščica and Kalnik in the west, the Bilogora to the north, the Moslavačka

Gora to the south, and, most importantly, the Petrov Vrh (St. Peter’s Peak)

at the western end of the Papuk to the east, the link to Central Slavonian

heights.40

39

GOSS, Two Saint Georges /note 1/, 17-22; IDEM, Three-Header /note 17/, 45.

40 GOSS, Two Saint Georges /note 1/, 13-17.

26

Fig. 6. The Sacred Circle (?) at Igrišče on the Kalnik

(GOSS, JUKIĆ, photo archives)

The second Trema, Trem, Tremi is at the top of a hill in the village of

Jakopovec (another Jacob on a hill!) to the south of Varaždin. The hill at a

lower altitude also features a well-preserved Romanesque church of St.

Jakob on a hillfort, while from the top we have a commanding view of the

holy mountain of Ivanščica, and of Kalnik, as well as of the Drava river

flatlands around Varaždin. One wonders if this Trem did not contain a log

palace of some early Varaždin “župan?” The King’s Free Borough of

Varaždin, a collective feudal lord, had its wine storage hall at the top of yet

another Trem near Varaždin, at Gornji Kneginec, nowadays succeeded by

an early 20th

ct. mansion.

Next we have the Tremski Breg (Trema Hill) above the village of

Šumečani to the East of Ivanić, one of the oldest settlements and posses-

sions of the Church of Zagreb in the 11th

century, along a road to another

27

such ancient settlement further east, Čazma. The vicinity of this yet to be

even basically explored Trema features a Đurino Brdo (St. George’s Hill),

Stupovi (Place of Columns), and what at the first glance appears as traces

of a Roman road. It also features a family by the name of Tremci.

Fig. 7. Pogano St. Peter, the Sacgred Circle (?)

(GOSS, JUKIĆ, photo archives).

Finally, a hamlet called Trem near St. Ivan Zelina (another documented

early settlement and possession of the church of Zagreb, late 12th

ct.) is

mentioned in a document from 1412. Not unlikely it was a seat of the

župan (count) of the Moravče County at some early date upon the migra-

tion.41

So by now we have defined the outlines of the space within which

we should search for the material remains of the elusive “Pre-Romanesque

Art of Pagan Slavs”.

41

GOSS, Three-Header /note 17/, 43-45.

28

3. Material remains

We have already listed five sites containing remains of what might be a

Slavic sacred circle (Trema, Igrišče, Mihalj, Kladeščica, Pogano St. Peter),

in 3 cases accompanied by traces of a rectangular building – maybe a hall.

In one case the name, Igrišče, a place of pagan rituals, strongly reinforces

its links with the pre-Christian past.42

Professor Katičić has also described

from Belarus and Russian folklore the form of Perun’s court on the moun-

tain, a circle containing a rectangular hall surrounded by one or several

rings of upright logs, the “stolps” (columns), with ornate doors, and at-

tached protected utilitarian spaces.43

This type of fortification is often en-

countered all over Continental Croatia (Pavlovac-Kolo, fig. 8). Names such

as Stupčanica, Stupovi (see Tremski breg above!), Stupnik, Stupovača may

indicate positions of such forts that did not survive. The description of

Perun’s court is closely matched by a fair number of mud and timber forts

in the area between the Sava and the Drava rivers, in particular its western

part. Some of them may be material remains of the earliest Slavic fortified

settlements in Croatia.44

Fig. 8. Pavlovac, Kolo (G. Jakovljević)

42

Ibid., 44.

43 KATIČIĆ, Zeleni lug /note 25/, 241f.

44 GOSS, Cultural Ecology /note 2/.

29

Finally there is the only preserved piece of stone sculpture attributed to pre-

Christian period, the three-header from Vaćani in Dalmatia, consistent with

representation of gods throughout Slavdom45

(fig. 9). The collected materi-

als we just listed make the likelihood that the fragment belongs to the pa-

gan Slavic past quite high.

Fig. 9. The Three-Header from Vaćani

(Museum of Croatian Archelogical Monuments – MHAS, Split).

The style of the piece may be described as “primitive” but the sections

where the original surface appears to have been preserved indicate quite a

competent level of carving, smooth and finished. The preserved detail also

seems to have been cut in with precision and competence. It is a stylistical-

45

GOSS, Three-Header /note 17/.

30

ly “naïve” piece but the sculptor was not without training. One is inclined

to conclude that we have in front of our eyes a work of a an artist who pre-

fers a high degree of stylization, symmetry (eyes of the preserved face),

parallelism of planes, but who does it as his stylistic preference and not as a

consequence of poor technique. This is compatible with what one may

broadly call “Pre-Romanesque” esthetics, but not necessarily only so. It

could still be a work of well-trained carver of some later (or earlier, e.g.

Roman provincial) period who has not mastered, or does not care for, the

art of human figure.

Fig. 10. The Sacred Landscape of the Western Papuk from Toranj

(GOSS, JUKIĆ, photo archives)

The form of the face could be, indeed, related to Roman provincial or Celt-

ic art. In particular, the perfectly rounded, bulging eyes remind one of Celt-

ic both sculpture and pottery. The representation of the eyes and the nose is

also “Celtic,” whereas the mouth seems also close to local later medieval

“folk” sculpture. In general, the best suggestion seems to be that the sculp-

tor was formed within the provincial Roman/post Roman art including the

traditions of the local Illyrian-Celtic population.

31

Fig. 11. The Sacred Landscape of the Western Papuk from Bijela

(GOSS, JUKIĆ, photo archives)

So much about the form. How about the function?

Numbers one, three (i.e., two plus one), five (four plus one), seven (six plus

one) and nine (eight plus one) seem to play an important role in the art and

architecture of both the “primitive” and not at all “primitive” civilizations –

from the sacred circle of innumerable religious traditions to the triangular

composition of the High Renaissance. On our territory the number three

figured prominently in both the Greek (Zeus, Hero, Athena) and Roman

(Jupiter, Juno, Athena) pantheons. The main Celtic gods also formed a triad

(Taranis, Esus, Teutates). Christianity features the Holy Trinity, parti-

cularly en vogue in the Carolingian period. Three faced pearls were discov-

ered at Prozor, Kompolje and Donja Dolina, and were linked to the Celtic

trade if not the outright manufacturing. A representation of the Holy Trinity

on late medieval frescoes at St. Brcko at Kalnik shows an image which

could be called a very inflated three-face pearl – three repeated faces of the

Members of the Holy Trinity painted next to one another. Such images con-

tinue in rural areas of Europe, e.g., western France into the 18th

century.

32

The Celts are known for a conflated image of a three-header, a head with

three faces, three noses and four eyes, which are shared between the central

and side faces. The famous “Mačak” (Cat) bracket from Rudina (12th

ct.) is

an impressive Romanesque rendering of that Celtic model.46

Thus: is our three-header from Vaćani a Roman or Greek, a Celtic, or a

Christian Trinity, or something else?

It is well-known that the pagan Slavs worshipped many headed or many

faced idols. There is even a literary underpinning for that multiplicity. A

Russian 15th

century text, a compilation of questions and answers says (I

translate): “How many heavens are there?” The answer: "Perun est mnog"

(There are many Peruns). A Lithuanian dajna tells us that there are four

Perkunai (the Baltic Perun), “Perkuns are four: the first one in the East, the

second in the West, the third in the South, the fourth in the North.” Scandi-

navian cosmology maintains a scheme whereby the heaven is supported by

four groups of dwarfs (Austri, Vestri, Nordri, Sudri) representing the four

winds. This, of course, reminds us of the multi-headed, or multi-faced Slav-

ic deities of old chronicles. Saxo Gramaticus saw a four headed Svantevid

at Rujan. There was also a seven-headed Rugevit, a five-headed Porevit,

and a four-headed Porenutius. Three-headed gods stood in Szczecin, Wolin

and Branibor (Brandenburg). That last one was identified as “Triglav,” and

destroyed in 1157 when Albert the Bear seized the stronghold of Branibor.

A later tradition renamed the Triglav into a goddess Trigla. A statue of

“twins” made of wood and datable to the 11th

-12th

ct., was discovered at

Fischerinsel, the place some identify with the famous Slavic fort of

Radogošč. In 1848, a four-headed god was found in the river Zbruč in Ga-

licia; a four-headed god was also found in Preslav, the ancient Bulgarian

capital, to list just a few better known examples. In his important book,

Slupecki has collected a number of examples of single and multi-headed

figures of idols, both in stone and wood, noticing Celtic analogies, and also

similar products of other peoples (e.g., Turkish). Many of them are rather

crude examples of incision in the rock (Wolgast), some equally crude two

plane relief pieces (Lezno), some reveal better sense of rounded form

46 GOSS, Three-Header /note 17/, 36-39.

33

(Powiercie, Kolo, Lysec), and some a fairly high degree of sculpting so-

phistication, as, for example, the “Svantevid” from Zbruč. Saying that

some of the detail may recall the piece from Vaćani again does not get us

much further. One should however note that the multiple-faced idols are

usually associated with an upright columnar form (Zbruč, Ivankovtse,

Yarivka, Fischerinsel). This seems to be the only firmer visual element

placing our piece within the sphere of pagan Slavic idol sculpture, be it in

wood or stone.47

Of course, there is the peak of Triglav in Slovenia and Troglav in the

Dinara Mountain in Croatia. The three-facedness related to Triglav and

Trigla finds a surprising reference in the names of two villages near

Daruvar in western Slavonia – Treglava (cf. Trigla) and Trojeglava. In

spite of the fact that western Slavonia has suffered seven depopulations and

repopulations in the last five hundred years or so, the area between

Bjelovar, Daruvar, Garešnica and Kutina is a true treasure-chest of old for-

gotten “gradišta,” entire townships probably relinquished when fleeing the

Turks, and of place names relating to pagan Avar and Slavic populations.

This is an additional argument to seriously consider the possibility that a

“Triglav” once stood in Treglava and Trojeglava although the villages as

we see them today offer little of historical or archeological interest.48

We

should make every effort to get together and study in a correlated way the

data we just reviewed, as well as those which have remained unknown to

the writer of those lines. Once extended to the area of at least between the

Baltic and the Adriatic, and related to the Germanic materials from the

zones to the West and the North, the materials may start making much

more sense than what they do today. Some of them may indeed prove to be

genuine monuments of the “Nordic” cultural landscape of the Germans and

the Slavs Strzygowski dreamed of.

47

BELAJ, Hod kroz godinu /note 23/, 80-84; Leszek Paweł SŁUPECKI, Slavonic Pagan

Sanctuaries, Warsaw 1994, chapter 11.

48 GOSS, Predromanika i romanika /note 26/.

34

4. Survivals

In two recent studies I have suggested that 1. the frequent appearance of

polyconchal buildings in the Pre-Romanesque architecture in Croatia may

be due to an early Slavic heritage of sanctuaries, which, as we know from

the Arab 10th

ct. sources, could be portable, as the travelers would carry

gods in a bag and, when so desired, place them in a circle, the chief god in

the middle, and adore them49

(fig. 12), and 2. that the Croatian westwork,

characteristic of the monumental buildings of Croatian Pre-Romanesque

and to be linked with Carolingian sources, may also have been stimulated

by the early Slavic heritage, i.e., the tower like structures of half-sunken

huts of the lands beyond the Carpathians also described by Arab travelers50

(fig. 13).

Fig. 12. Split. Holy Trinity and St. Michael at Poljud, ca. 800

(GOSS, JUKIĆ, photo archives)

49

GOSS, Landscape as History /note 22/, 158.

50 Vladimir P. GOSS, The 'Croatian Westwork' revisited, in: Ars 43 (2010), pp. 3-23,

here 20.

35

What has been said about numbers when dealing with multi-headed deities

is also relevant for rounded and polychoncal buildings. It is also important

to stress the existence of an enormous number of small Christian rounded

or similar centralized (polygonal, polyconchal) buildings in Northern, East-

ern and Central Europe. Generally, those buildings are linked to the Pala-

tine Chapel at Aachen, to be sure a powerful and evocative source. Yet the

case of Croatian polyconchs leads us to reconsideration.51

Fig. 13. Savior's Church at Cetina, late 9th ct.

(GOSS, JUKIĆ, photo archives)

There are twelve Pre-Romanesque polyconchs on record (ten hexachonch

and two octaconchs) in Croatia (11) and Bosnia (1), the largest such com-

pact group in the West. There is a late antique (6th

ct.) baptistery in Zadar,

hexagonal without and hexaconchal within (fig. 14). It and some other sim-

ilar structures, such as Diocletian’s mausoleum in Split have been usually

pointed out as models. We agree but also maintain that the strange popular-

ity of a type unsuitable for a Christian church is due to the fact that the

51 GOSS, Landscape as History /note 22/, 152-160.

36

Slavs, in the process of Christianization, recognized the form as something

close to their sacred tradition and thus willingly adopted the type for one of

the solutions in the early phase of Christianization in the late 8th

and the

early 9th

ct.52

Fig. 14. Zadar, Baptistery, 6th ct. (T. Marasović)

At the Perun Monastery in Novgorod (torn down by the communists in

1918), a Perun sanctuary was discovered consisting of a circular raised

platform of ca. 10 meters, with a lower part of a broken statue still in situ,

surrounded by a shallow ditch with eight curving apsidal areas. It has been

suggested that here we have a Perun in the middle, and eight of his aspects

around him. Two 10th

century sanctuaries of the same type (surrounded by

a circular fence!) were discovered at Pohansko (fig. 15) near Breclav in

Slovakia, a similar one at Plock on the Wistula. Additionally, many round-

52

GOSS, Landscape as History /note 22/, 155f.

37

ed sanctuaries have been identified. So sacred circles of simple kind have

been found also at Tushemla, Prudki and Gorodok near Smolensk, two of

them at Trebiatow, one at Parsteiner See and at Saaringen on the territory

of the Polabian Slavs, at Pskov, etc. Sacredness of the circle is attested by

the Egil Saga mentioning a circle marked by ropes within which the judges

sit; the Frankish Lex Ripuaria demanded that oaths be sworn within a circle

surrounded by hazelnut trees, also sacred to the Slavs.53

Fig. 15. Pohansko, Sacred Circle, Reconstruction

(GOSS, JUKIĆ, photo archives)

However, for a discussion of memory and the ways of keeping it alive, the

most important argument is a passage from the Arab writer Ibn Fadlan,

who saw in 922 a group of Russian merchants among the Bulgars on the

53 SŁUPECKI, Slavonic Pagan Sanctuaries /note 47/, 11-18, 122-130, 137, 140-150,

185; GOSS, Landscape as History /note 22/, 158.

38

Volga worshiping a number of small idols placed in a circle, in the middle

of which stood a bigger one, addressed as “My Lord.” Thus the polycon-

chal/rounded sanctuary was portable! One had just to unpack the “idols”,

draw a circle, place them in the right position, and adore them! Nothing ex-

ceptional as Cosma tells us that the Czechs brought their Gods along, and

Thorolf, when he went to Iceland, took along a plank from a sanctuary of

Thor bearing the God’s image, and when he reached the coast he threw the

Thor into the waves and settled where the plank landed.54

The polyconchal structures in Croatia appear most often in Zadar or in

Zadar hinterland (six). As the capital of Byzantine Dalmatia, the city must

have had a considerable appeal. The land in Zadar hinterland has been

known since the settlement times as “V Hrvatih” (At the Croats)55

where

the most powerful of immigrating groups had settled. If the neighboring

Slavs accepted Christianity, they initially did it in the baptistery of the capi-

tal city. There, they would have seen a building which, inside, recalled their

traditional sanctuaries. As those did not have a cover, it was the plan that

counted, the sacred plan codified by the tradition, an important factor in na-

tional identity! There they experienced the change from the old to a new

God – who welcomed them within a space recalling the sacred areas of

their ancestors.56

It is worth noting that in some other Slavic areas polyconchs stand at the

beginning of the line of architecture in durable materials. In Poland, the

tetraconch on the Wawel in Krakow, in Moravia the tetraconch within a

circle at Mikulčice.57

The recent discovery at the Budinjak hill seems to

add Continental Croatia to the list.58

Tetraconch is particularly easy to relate to the idea of four cardinal points,

four winds, four pillars of heaven, etc., and so also is a model in which

polyconch is combined with a square or polygon, resulting in alternating,

54

BELAJ, Hod kroz godinu /note 23/, 84.

55 Vedrana DELONGA, Latinski epigrafički spomenici u ranosrednjovjekovnoj

Hrvatskoj, Split 1996, p. 52

56 GOSS, Landscape as History /note 22/, 154-158.

57 In Bohemia, the original tetraconch plan of St. Vit in Prague has now been disputed.

58 GOSS, Three-Header /note 17/, 45; IDEM, Landscape as History /note 22/, 161-162.

39

four plus four, circular and rectangular niches, or even circular niches and

straight stretches of the wall. The form is well-known from Roman (Dio-

cletian’s Mausoleum) and Early Christian examples (baptisteries in Raven-

na, etc.). There is a pagan Slavic temple at Chodosoviche in eastern

Ukraine (10-11th

ct.), where a circular enclosure with a statue of god was

surrounded by four C-shaped half-buried altar areas, and another, smaller

one with just two (recalling some Great Moravian rotundas!). At

Khnylopiat near Zhitomir there are traces of a sanctuary in the shape of the

cross, apparently with smaller curving protrusions between the arms, re-

calling again some early Christian baptisteries, and, in general buildings in

which conchs alternate with rectilinear areas, e.g. the cathedral of Split.

The Chodosoviche arrangement recalls a number of northeastern German

churches such as at Brandenburg (Branibor) and Ludorf, which had already

claimed Strzygowski’s attention. And, of course, the fascinating cross-

shaped church at Kalundborg in Denmark.59

We have already mentioned the importance of the Palatine Chapel at Aa-

chen as a possible source of the Christian centralized churches of Eastern

and central Europe. Nobody would discard the analogies the Aachen chapel

shares with its august imperial predecessor, San Vitale in Ravenna. Yet be-

yond the general outlay – and this in Aachen is closer to a circle (octagon

inside, sixteen cornered shell outside) than in Ravenna (clear octagon), and

the basic formation of internal two story tripartite openings – it is hard not

to notice the “medieval” compactness of the mass and space, the bulk and

heaviness of the supports, and the flat effect of perforated wall units of the

interior in contrast with an almost Baroque playfulness of St. Vitale’s

space. In addition, the original sanctuary was a rather small rectangular

projection such as known from the standard architecture of the Carolingian

time both in permanent materials and wood. And, finally, the Chapel fea-

tures a prominent westwork, tailored to the needs of an imperial building

and its user, Charlemagne.60

59

SŁUPECKI, Slavonic Pagan Sanctuaries /note 47/, chapters 5-7.

60 GOSS, Landscape as History /note 22/, 161; Wolfgang BRAUNFELS, Aquisgrana, in:

A. M. ROMANINI (ed.), Encyclopedia dell’arte medievale, Rome 1991, vol. 2, pp.

210-216.

40

Uwe Lobbeday has pointed out that we really do not know the source of the

Carolingian turris, that marvelous invention which turned the boring, low-

lying early Christian basilica into an exciting asset to the landscape, pro-

foundly changing its expressive content in the process. By proposing a very

useful distinction between a westwork proper and a “westbau,” Lobbeday

has reminded us that western annexes existed along the facades of Christian

churches form a much earlier period. Only, they mostly complied with the

simple silhouette of the building’s body. Many western burial chambers of

Pre-Romanesque churches, from Asturias to Croatia, follow that principle.

Once a “turris” rises over that “crypt,” we have a westwork.61

In what is

still in my opinion the most thorough discussion of the western massif is-

sue, Carol Heitz has explained the full westwork as a place reserved for the

liturgy of the Savior (Christmas and Easter), topping a “crypt” with an al-

tar.62

As the westwork does not seem to have any precedents in Classical

architecture of the Mediterranean, one could speculate about potential pre-

historic or “barbarian” sources, such as menhirs, stelae on top of burial tu-

muli, some forms of Celtic religious architecture, postulated wooden forms,

early medieval tower like structures containing a tomb or an altar allegedly

existing in the Eastern Alps, but there is, at this point, as far as I can see no

single convincing source. Let us not forget, either, that the westwork is in

principle a centralized structure. Thus, putting together a westwork and a

rotunda would seem to be a tautology.63

Yet, it did occur. Here, indeed the Palatine Chapel at Aachen may be a very

distinguished model. As opposed to the exactly contemporary St. Riquier at

Centula, where a centralized western annex was attached to a longitudinal

61

Uwe LOBBEDAY, Die Beitrag von Corvey zur Geschichte der Westbauten und

Westwerke, in: Hortus artium medievalium, 8 (2002), pp. 83-98.

62 Carol HEITZ, Les recherches sur les rapports entre l’architecture et la liturgie à

l’époque carolingienne, Paris 1963.

63 Vladimir GVOZDANOVIĆ (V. P. Goss), The South-Eastern Border of Carolingian

Architecture, in: Cahiers archeologiques 27 (1978), pp. 85-100, here 87-88; GOSS,

Croatian Westwork /note 50/, 13-16; Josef ZYKAN, Die Karolingisch-Vorromani-

sche Malerei in Oesterreich, in: Karl GINHART, ed., Die Bildende Kunst in

Österreich – Vorromanische und Romanische Zeit, Vienna 1937, pp. 46-50, here 48;

Alois FUCHS, Die Karolingischen Westwerke und Andere Fragen der

Karolingischen Baukunst, Paderborn 1929.

41

nave, the sequence in Aachen is (atrium=nave) – western turris – central-

ized (polygonal) “nave” – rectangular sanctuary. That sequence – tower, ro-

tunda, sanctuary – is well-known from Eastern Europe, where, no doubt,

the Aachen model was applied on local level. The turris at Aachen is rela-

tively simple compared to St. Riquier at Centula, or the magnificent

westwork at Corvey, yet more assertive than other chronologically close

achievements such as at Inden or Steinbach. In a careful analysis Braunfels

has distinguished the functions of the several areas of the Chapel. The

“Palatine Chapel” is the octagonal space in the middle, the upper story is

reserved for the ruler and his retinue, with a throne of the Emperor at its

western side, next to the tower which contained another Emperor’s throne,

facing the atrium, and above, on the upper story, there was the chamber

storing the relics.64

The throne that faced the atrium was placed so the Ruler could receive the

laudes of the public. It was above the tomb of Charlemagne which was so

well hidden that the Normans missed it when sacking Aachen in 881, and

Otto III barely managed to find it in 1000. The central area, surmounted by

a dome showing Christ and the Elders of the Apocalypse was the earliest

preserved “sacred space” to the north of the Alps. What is, according to

Braunfels, absolutely new, is the appearance of the tribune with the throne

(although one may have stood at the westbau of St. Denis). What is also

worth noting is the separation of the sacred (central space) and the turris

zone. This does not seem to have been the case at St. Riquier, an argument

for the role of local and individual factors in the creation of individual

westworks, the factor in Aachen being Charlemagne himself.

The early history of the site of the Palatine Chapel is also not without inter-

est. Aachen, Aquae Grani and Aquis Granum (Larousse), Aquisgranum

(Encyclopaedia Brittanica), is a place dedicated to Granus, a Celtic deity of

water. It continued to be a popular spa, and a pilgrimage spot. St. Mary du-

ly inherited the place, and in the 5th

century Her sanctuary was built over

Granus’ springs. The place is for the first time mentioned in written sources

64

BRAUNFELS, Aquisgrana /note 60/, 210-216.

42

when Pepin restored the chapel in 761-766. It was apparently a rotunda

with rectangular annexes, something like a hall plus a sanctuary?65

I think it is legitimate to see the Palatine Chapel also as a product of an un-

classical tradition, a sacred circle (16 cornered body), terminated in the east

in a totally un-classical manner, preceded by a tower which fulfils all the

requirement for the structural relationships set by non-classical – Germanic

or Slavic traditions. This tower features the world of the holiest at its top

(the chapel with the relics – comparable to the seat of Perun, Thor, St. Mi-

chael), the world of the terrestrial ruler in the middle, and the underworld

(the tomb, Veles) at the bottom.66

To illustrate this further here is a list of

opposites V. Belaj assigns to Perun and Veles respectively:

Perun

Up

High

Light

Above Ground

Summer

Veža – above ground construction

Mountain, hill

Dry

Ruler and his retinue

Weapons, war

Etc.

Veles

Down

Low

Dark

Underground

Winter

Jama (Jata) – underground space

Water, river

Wet

Peasants, servants

Cattle, material wealth

The most frequent images are the tree (e.g., dry pine) as Perun’s seat as op-

posed to the wet and dark root area as Veles’s seat, or a hill (mountain) as

opposed to a wet plain, marshland, water.67

The westwork clearly belongs

to the same sphere of imagery. Here we have a situation where a form and

concept exist, and are accommodated within the framework of the tradition,

65

Ibid.

66 GOSS, Croatian Westwork /note 50/, 20.

67 BELAJ, Hod kroz godinu /note 23/, 69, 136-139.

43

collective memory of the adopting side. The ground floor, the crypt, is the

netherworld of Veles. The heights belong to the Resurrected Savior, St.

Michael, the angels, and the live terrestrial ruler. To Perun, Thor, Perkunas

and their court.

Is there anything to substantiate such, let us admit, extravagant proposal?

Not much, but still worth quoting. Cultural anthropology tells us that there

was culture. Linguistics teaches us how to look for and reconstruct forms

that are no more. I am referring to those strange clusters of sounds with an

‘*’, so mystifying and baffling to the non-expert. Together they should help

us presume, at least tentatively, an existence of an ‘*’ art form, and enable

us to describe it on the basis of what we have. So as the linguists invoke

non-existing but presumed verbal forms referring to Indo and Pre-Indo Eu-

ropean past, it would be equally legitimate to do so in the area of visual

forms.68

If you visit the Spiš (Zips) region in eastern Slovakia you will discover as

one of the greatest assets of an anyhow delightful landscape a medieval vil-

lage church, aisleless and with a rectangular sanctuary, and a sturdy tower

at the entrance.69

Just like in Polish, the tower is called “veža,” somewhat

confusing for a speaker of Croatian who associates the same word with a

“porch,” or “entrance hall.” The word appears to derive from the Indo-

European root *aug indicating “light,” in pre-Slavic weg- which with a suf-

fix –ja gives wegja, i.e. veža. We know that the early Slavs made a big use

of “zemunicas”, half-buried dwellings – a rectangular area dug into the

ground, covered by some kind of a gable roof. We have a description of

such a building from the White Croatia beyond the Carpathians by the Arab

traveler Ahmed ibn Omar ibn Rosteh (early 10th

ct.): “In the Slavic land of

Gurab (that is the White Croatia to the North of the Carpathians) the win-

ters are very cold, so they dig holes which they cover with pointed roofs

such as one can see in Christian churches upon which they put clay...” Thus

the “zemunicas” (at least some) bore a certain not negligible superstructure

which recalled “pointed” church roofs (gable or pyramid?). The Czech

scholar, Šimun Ondruš, has suggested that one type of Slavic home was a

68

GOSS, Croatian Westwork /note 50/, 20.

69 GOSS, ŠEPIĆ, A Note on Some Churches /note 13/, 34-39.

44

half-buried building with an added entrance structure constructed from

logs. The hole is the Veles’s world of “down there,” darkness and winter,

the superstructure is the “wegja,” Perun’s world of “up there,” summer and

light. It would be nice to have an exact reconstruction of an early Slavic

veža, but even this may suffice to raise a very intriguing question: do we

have in the wegja a source of one of the most fascinating and revolutionary

inventions of Pre-Romanesque architecture, the westwork?70

Why do we wish to examine the issue in the light of Croatian materials?

Because it is evident that within the core of the Early Medieval Croatian

state, the Dalmatian Highlands around Knin, there existed a group of build-

ings displaying some characteristics of the contemporary Carolingian archi-

tecture, including one of the most innovative and impressive features of

medieval architecture in general, the westwork. The buildings could be re-

lated to the ruling family and the highest officials of the state, and the best

preserved example, the church at the source of the Cetina (fig. 13), even

bore a dedication to the Savior. Briefly in Croatia there are 11 churches

with a western massif as a common feature datable with some certainty to

the 9th

or early 10th

ct. Today, four of them, at Bijaći, Koljani, Žažvić and

Crkvina in Biskupija are dated toward the earlier 9th

century. The second,

more coherent group, today usually dated to the second half of the 9th

cen-

tury includes the churches of St. Cecilija at Stupovi, and the churches at the

Bukurovića podvornice and Lopuška glavica, all in Biskupija, the Savior’s

church at the Cetina, St. Mary at Blizna, and the cathedral of the royal city

of Biograd. The common feature of the buildings is rounded buttresses,

complete vaulting, and a western massif. The buildings represent a compact

stylistic group, and as such they must have come into being within one

generation or so. The western massif can be best studied at the only reason-

ably preserved building – the Savior’s Church at Cetina (fig. 13). It appears

as a reduction of a “voll-westwerk” – a tall, tapering tower with a two-story

annex opening onto the single nave. The upper story was almost certainly

70

GOSS, Croatian Westwork /note 50/, 20-21; BELAJ, Hod kroz godinu /note 23/, 136-

139.

45

reserved for the “župan” – the administrator of the county of Cetina,

Gastica (Gastiha), recorded in an inscription on the choir-screen.71

A related group, in Pannonia, is represented by the large ninth century

church being excavated at Lobor in Northwestern Croatia, to which, one

might add an apparently similar church at Zalavár-Récéskut, the seat of

Slavic princes of Lower Pannonia, nowadays in Hungary. They are both

aisled, have a flat termination wall (yet to be definitely confirmed at Lobor)

and a westwork.72

One might argue that in Croatia a local Carolingian type was formed by the

second half of the 9th

century, on the basis of earlier experiments. These

themselves were based on an interplay of what was brought in by Frankish

missionaries, what the rulers themselves learned about “rulers’ churches”,

or what they and their companions saw by themselves while visiting the

centers of the Empire, and on how all this was absorbed by the local tradi-

tion steeped in the rich Roman and Early Christian legacy. If we compare

the developed Croatian westwork of the later 9th

century, to anything within

the Empire we will find limited analogies, the closest being, apparently,

around the very center of the Empire – at Steinbach or Inden, or, in a more

monumental form, at Corvey, i.e., a façade with an emphasis on a single

tower and a central protrusion. The problem with Steinbach and Inden is

that their apparently more modest height does not correspond to what we

find in Croatia, whereas Corvey is much too monumental and complex to

be singled out as analogy. Still, this reinforces the idea that the Croatian

rulers and their entourage visiting Carolingian state gatherings learned by

autopsy what was “right” for them, and continued doing the same after they

severed all political ties with the Empire in 870ies. Croatian early ninth

century princes – Borna (of Dalmatian Croats), later on Braslav (of Panno-

nia), or their emissaries – in case of Duke Ljudevit of Pannonia, and also of

Borna, participated in Frankish imperial councils; so also did the rulers of

Lower Pannonia around the Balaton Lake, Pribina and Kozil. This presence

is especially notable during the rule of Louis the Pious and the rebellion

71

GOSS, Croatian Westwork /note 50/, 6-11; GVOZDANOVIĆ, The South-Eastern Bor-

der /note 63/, 87-94.

72 GOSS, Croatian Westwork /note 50/, 10f.

46

(819-823) of the above mentioned Ljudevit, when Borna sided with his

Frankish overlords. They could have seen that very important westwork

linked to the key imperial building, the Palatine Chapel at Aachen, con-

structed for and by Charlemagne himself, which by its position, bulk, and

height is not incompatible with the “Croatian westwork”. As in the case of

the polyconchal structures, the memories of the old country were reignited,

and the Croatian turris was born. I hasten to add that all this remains a hy-

pothesis until we may have more evidence of the veža, one more argument

to double our efforts in search of such materials.73

Strzygowski showed interest in the chapel at Aachen and he knew the Cro-

atian buildings with westworks.74

But he failed to realize their importance.

They were too big, too longitudinal, and provided with rounded apses,

briefly too Mediterranean. Today, I am sure he would have thought differ-

ently. However, before proceeding any further a few more words on

Strzygowski’s book on Aachen are in order. Within his opus this may be

the clearest example of Strzygowski’s method at its scholarly best. What he

does is to carefully put together a case for the non-Classical elements of the

Aachen chapel by considering works of other arts which may be related to

the chapel. To some extent he reiterates the process in the second part of

the book when dealing with its highly dubious 19th

century restoration. To

use a more contemporary idiom, he constructs a cultural language of a

group of monuments of which the chapel is the key piece. One may disa-

gree with some of his interpretations, but the method is refreshingly mod-

ern, i.e., it falls in line with the research into “cultural landscape” as it has

been proposed over last half a century by such scholars as Scully, Yi-Fu

Tuan and Schama,75

research mostly neglected by the mainstream art histo-

ry still today, yet clearly anticipated by Josef Strzygowski.

73

Ibid., 11f., 20f.

74 Josef STRZYGOWSKI, Der Dom zu Aachen und seine Entstellung, Leipzig 1904;

IDEM, Starohrvatska umjetnost, Zagreb 1927; IDEM, Altslavische Kunst, Augsburg

1929.

75 Vincent SCULLY, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture,

New Haven 1962; Yi-Fu TUAN, Topophilia, New York 1974; Simon SCHAMA,

Landscape as Memory, New York 1995.

47

The book on Aachen is probably the most successful among Strzygowski’s

studies in those terms. It could be so since it deals with a relatively narrow

field of mostly well-researched monuments. When the sheer number of

monuments and their relative anonymity imposed itself as a lure into specu-

lation, as in Strzygowski’s well-known studies of Asia Minor, Armenia, or

even the whole of Asia, as the factual basis was less complete and had to be

filled in by speculation (attempting an Asiens Bildende Kunst by any indi-

vidual scholar even today is obviously a mission impossible), Strzygowski

could not resist this lure.76

Yet such approach even when flawed does not contradict the fact that with

an intuition of a genius Josef Strzygowski grasped the existence of cultural

landscapes beyond reach of the western scholarship. The materials he en-

countered and transmitted to the exasperated western “humanists” were un-

fortunately scattered, insufficient and un-systemized. Strzygowski attempt-

ed to define and present truly surprising, and to the most of the western

scholarship incomprehensible materials, including the segment I have

termed the Pre-Romanesque art of the Pagan Slavs. This is an enormous

contribution in itself. In retrospect, as we have concluded our project (or,

better, concluded its first phase – date gathering), I gladly admit that we

have in fact redefined a methodology Strzygowski practiced a century ago;

which, when carefully based on the facts, as scarce and as difficult to inter-

pret they may be, is bound to eventually enrich our knowledge of the past.

Many things we know today would have certainly helped Strzygowski

build more coherent pictures. I am sure he would have been delighted to

see some material embodiments of his imagination, in our case of the Pre-

Romanesque art of the Pagan Slavs, as we briefly listed them above; and on

the more general and monumental scale, of a Europe not only of the Classi-

cal Antiquity, but also of the Orient and the Barbarians, a picture which

still requires a concerted effort to be truly filled; or, coming back to Pausa-

nias, and, closer in our own time to Lewis Mumford, to be expanded as a

picture of competing cultural landscapes of the urb and rus, the real

76 Josef STRZYGOWSKI, Kleinasien. Ein Neuland der Kunstgeschichte, Leipzig 1903;

IDEM, Die Baukunst der Armenier und Europa, Wien 1913; IDEM, Asiens Bildende

Kunst in Stichproben, Augsburg 1930.

48

dicothomy of our human heritage and predicament. Josef Strzygowski did

not know quite a few things we know today, yet he boldly stood up for the

repressed aspects of our cultural patrimony. David Buxton, the brave inves-

tigator of the wooden architecture of Eastern Europe said, very appropriate-

ly, that he himself, and all of us, are deeply indebted to Josef Strzygovski.

The spatial forms, the material traces, and the survivals we briefly analyzed

above, unavailable or unrecognized at the time Strzygowski created his

theories, would suffice for decades of scholarly studies filling up the

McClendon lacuna in the area of the Pre-Romanesque art, as a worthy

move in the right direction reconfirming Josef Strzygowski’s courageous

stance against mono-centrism and elitism in the European humanist re-

search.77

We cannot ignore a large section of our European heritage spanning many

centuries, from the Great Migrations to the 14th

century, when the last out-

post of Paganism, Lithuania, accepted Christianity. The recovery of Pagan

and Christian cultural heritage of the Eastern, Eastern Central, and South-

eastern Europe would constitute a major step toward reinventing a Europe

of true equality of its peoples and their cultural contributions, a multi-focal

Europe of diverse lights, yet all contributing to the same shining glow.

The correct reading of our cultural ecology and this involves also recover-

ing forgotten and neglected aspects of our heritage could be a precious tool

in creating a better functioning environment for the United Europe, both

present and future.

Further reference:

AILLAGON, J-J. (ed.), Rome and the Barbarians, Venice 2008

CURTA, F., The Making of the Slavs, Cambridge 2001/2008

GOSS, Vladimir P., Monuments of Art History as Historical Documents, in:

Prilozi Instituta za arheologiju 24 (2007), pp. 499-501

GOSS, Vladimir P., Orugli toranj? in: Starohrvatska prosvjeta 34 (2007),

pp. 491-493

77

David BUXTON, The Wooden Churches of Eastern Europe, Cambridge 1981, p. 7.