| PRIZREN |  |
| PRIZREN | |
The city area of Prizren was repeatedly bombed by NATO.
VIRGIN LJEVISKA CHURCH
The Prizren Cathedral
Experts are afraid that the City Cathedral may be seriously endangered.
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| The Prizren cathedral
dedicated to the Virgin was built by the King Milutin in 1306/1307 on the remains of a
church from the 13th century which had been built on the foundation of a
basilica from the middle Byzantine period (9th-11th century), the
latter built on the foundation of an early Christian shrine. The master builder, Nicholas,
who most probably came from Epirus, managed to build an architecturally very successful
edifice whose center is the five-dome church with the developed cross-in-square,
surrounded by the lateral nave and narthex with open porch (today, its passages are walled
up) and with a tower on the western side. The Turks converted it into mosque and, in order
to adjust it to their needs, chiseled the frescoes and repainted them. Severely damaged
paintings are of exceptional value and fall within the most successful frescos from the
time of the Byzantine dynasty of the Palaeologoi. They were painted by the main painter
Astrapa from Salonica together with his associates around 1310-1313 who, judging by the
modest remains of paintings, made an exceptionally original choice of compositions and
individual figures and their iconographic solutions, both in details and as a whole. Of
particular importance are the portraits of founders and the procession of Nemanjics,
ancestors of the King Milutin, who are of supernatural size. Conservation and restoration
works on architecture were carried out in the 1950s, while the paintings were discovered
under the layers of lime in 1950-1952 to be subsequently cleaned and retouched several
times in the 1969-1979 period.
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