Liturgical objects in the context of silversmith’s art during the Ottoman period (based on materials from the Plovdiv Diocese) is a research project of an art historians’ team that aims to conduct an in-depth study of sacred vessels of worship. Within the framework of the project, silversmith’s artworks with ecclesiastical use from the 17th to 19th centuries, kept in churches and monasteries on the territory of the Plovdiv Diocese, will be the subject of research and contextualization in relation to Eastern Orthodox traditions, practices, and artistic trends in the Balkans and in Southeastern Europe.
The commissioning and donation of liturgical objects are among the most vivid manifestations of religiosity, testifying both to the pious devotion to God and to the socio-cultural, economic, and historical context in which they were created. The expansion of the corpus of precious metal church utensils that are already known, combining it with the available historical and archival sources, and studying the local guilds of silversmiths that worked during the period of Ottoman rule in the region of Central South Bulgaria, as well as the silversmiths’ workshops or factories where the imported church utensils came from, will create a good basis for a further in-depth analysis of the silver liturgical objects.
The results of the project will expand our understanding of the significance of material culture in the religious life of believers and the development of applied arts in the Ottoman period.
