Paris Exhibit Shows Greece’s Mount Athos Treasures to Wide Audience, Women Included
BalkanTravellers.com
Most of the objects included in the exhibition have never left Greece before. They include an impressive array of treasures, such as icons, liturgical vestments, chalices, reliquaries, illuminated manuscripts, medallions and mosaics. According to experts, some of the most spectacular items on display are chrysobulls -- imperial decrees with golden seals.
In addition, a catholicon, or central church of one of the monasteries, has been reconstructed to give visitors a feeling for the peninsula’s medieval architecture.
As BalkanTravellers.com wrote, Mount Athos is a self-governed monastic community under the protection of Greece, composed of 20 monasteries scattered around a territory of more than 300 square kilometres. Built over a period of roughly 700 years (eight to the fourteenth centuries), nearly half of the monasteries date from the tenth century.
“Mount Athos could be dismissed as a historical curiosity, the last remnant of the once mighty Byzantine Empire, if it didn’t house one of the richest treasures of religious art in the world,” Jorg von Uthmann, a critic for Bloomberg News, wrote in a recent review of the exhibition. “Since the 1980s, a European Union-funded effort to catalogue, protect and restore them is under way -- a massive task that will take decades before it is completed,” he added.
The exhibition “Le Mont Athos et l’Empire Byzantin” runs through July 5 at the Petit Palais in Paris.
Read more about Mount Athos on BalkanTravellers.com
Read more about Greece on BalkanTravellers.com
Use BalkanTravellers.com's tips to organize your trip to Greece
Epicure
Bulgaria
Shopska Salad: Three common mistakes
To Bulgarians, Shopska salad is a bit like the scrambled eggs case – while it looks as if there is no way to screw the dish, in fact its proper preparation requires nothing less then utter care and devotion. In this case – in selecting the right products and adjusting the proportions. Full Story
Curiosity Chest
Balkans
The Red and White Strings that Welcome Spring in Bulgaria and Romania
I remember walking along Canal Street in New York’s Chinatown on March 2 a few years ago, when I saw a man sporting a small ornament made of red and white thread pinned to his coat lapel. He must be Bulgarian, I thought to myself with a sudden rush of homesickness, but now realize that he may have been Romanian as well.
Full Story
Useful Reads
Bulgaria
Street without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (2008) | By Kapka Kassabova
Danube blues
Text by Nicholas Lezard for The Guardian*
Full Story
Music
Bulgaria
The Choir that Turned England a Bit Bulgarian
One of the few constant sources of pride for Bulgarians is traditional folk music, and especially singing. But not the Oriental-beats-modified kind that often booms in nightclubs, giving their clientele the urge to jump atop tables and chairs and sway their hips around; rather the kind that, when heard, mesmerises you and gives you goose bumps, the kind that is haunting with its out-of-this universe quality, mostly figuratively but sometimes literally as well.
Full Story
-
Photogalleries
-
A Perfect Shot
Koprivshtitsa Fair, Bulgara. Photographs by Neva Micheva
In Homo Urbanus Europeanus, exhibited May 9-24 in front of the National Theatre in Sofia, Jean-Marc Caracci presents his photographs of people in the urban environment of European capitals.
RED&WHITE SOFIA. On the 1st of March Bulgarians say goodbye to the winter. They buy each other red&white threads to carry around until they see a stork and spring can begin. Photography by Lode Desmet
BULGARIA D'OR: The Bulgarian countryside, patinated with the noble golden dust of the autumn. Photographs by Lode Desmet
360 degrees Bulgaria, an exhibition by photographer Alexandar Ivanov, is on display at the Sea Garden in Varna until August 28. It will be shown at Plovdiv’s Central Square from Sept 5.
The exhibition Photographs of a Trip Through Bulgaria by Hungarian photographer András Balla can be seen in Sofia's Hungarian Cultural Institute, at Aksakov 16 Street, until August 22
Instant Spring in Sofia | Photographs by Lode Desmet
Off-the-season Beauty of Bulgaria's Black Sea Coast | Photographs by Adelina Iliev
Bulgaria's Northern Black Sea Coast
Photographs by Albena Shkodrova
excellent smugs
