The cemetery church of Rožen Monastery

Abstract

The foundation of Rožen Monastery is dated to the twelfth to thirteenth
century on the basis of its architecture and the surviving written sources.
Some authors are of the opinion that initially —till the end of the fourteenth
century— the monastery was a dependency with a church dedicated to St
George and that in 1309 it was presented to Iviron Monastery on Mount
Athos. After the conquest of the district by the Ottomans in 1395 it was
abandoned. In the first half of the fourteenth century new donors renovated
it and consecrated it to the Dormition of the Virgin and later to her Nativity.
The actual cemetery church stands north-west of the monastery walls.
It is a two-storey church with a nave, and the entrance is on the north side.
Like the other Christian churches surviving in Melnik, it stands on a high 

stone plinth. The floor is of brick and the roof of wood and it consists of the
narthex and the nave; only the latter is frescoed. The donor’s inscription states
that the cemetery church was consecrated in 1662, but the building itself was
probably completed earlier, in 1597. It seems likely that its construction was
a part of a larger programme for the renovation of the monastery because
the frescoes on the west and south façades of the catholicon date from 1597
and 1611, as probably does the first pictorial layer in the narthex.
The dedication of Roien Monastery’s cemetery church to St John the
Baptist has its explanation in the character of his cult: he is one of the most
highly venerated saints in the monastic world owing to the connection between
his preaching and eschatological beliefs.
Because of the lack of height, the symbolism of the iconographical
programme is developed chiefly on the horizontal plane. On the east sanctuary
wall are represented the Mother of God Platytera, the Church Fathers and
Liturgists, the Annunciation, Christ in the Tomb, the Vision of Peter of Alexandria,
and Jonah Emerging from the Whale’s Mouth. The whole surface
of the south, west and north walls is divided in two zones. The lower zone
is occupied by figures of standing saints and the upper by the cycle of the
Baptist. The exclusion of the Christological cycle and of such other important
themes as the Holy Communion and the Baptism of Christ is due to the particular
purpose of the cemetery church, which —even though an independent
building— functioned as a chapel, subordinate to the catholicon. In spite
of the considerable shortening, the iconography of the sancruary essentially
follows the tradition established in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
The cycle of the Baptist shows interesting pecularities: the Nativity,
for instance, is isolated from the Naming of John; and the scene of the Angel
Conducting the Infant John into the Desert is united with that of the Angel
Instructing the Baptist. The style of the frescoes of the cemetery church shows
them to be most closely related to those on the façade of Rožen’s catholicon
dating from 1597. Their painter had a very good feeling for psychological
nuance and explanatory detail, but to a degree which does not exceed the
norms of medieval convention and restraint. His art consequently remains
within the tradition, in spite of the spatial and representative experimentation
evident in some of the compositions. Their essence is similar to trends in
contemporary Western art.
No less interesting is the ideological significance of the wall paintings
in the context of the social, ecclesiastical, and political problems of the time.
After it fell to the Ottomans, the area around Melnik remained a crossroads
for the influences from the material, cultural, and spiritual spheres. At that 

time, the most important centres in the Balkans were Mount Athos, Thessaloniki,
Constantinople, and later on Romania. A scriptorium operated in
Rožen Monastery, where monks from Bachkovo were taught, which gives
us reason to suppose that communication existed between the two monasteries
for ecclesiastical, political, and cultural purposes, chiefly with regard to the
struggle against the alien faith in which the nationality of the monks was not
important. It is precisely as a reflection of their hopes of liberation that one
should view the great representation of Jacob’s Ladder on the façade of
Rožen’s catholicon, dating from 1611. The same applies to the external decoration
of many Wallachian and Moldavian churches from the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. So, without straying from the doctrinal and canonical
precepts of Orthodox art, the artists of Rožen Monastery’s cemetery
church preserved the position of monks and the ecclesiastical hierarchy
through the tendentious inclusion of specific themes in the architectural and
decorative ensemble. The basic idea was to demonstrate the eternity of the
Christian religion, the monks’ role in its preservation and spread and the
moral and spiritual virtues of the Baptist, who, as the first hermit, had shown
his followers the way to salvation.