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About the Construction Changes of St. George’s Church in Belec – something different
Drago Miletić
; Hrvatski restauratorski zavod, Zagreb
Sažetak
St. George’s Church in Belec has always been enticing the interest of researchers. Szabo (1912) emphasizes the mystery behind the chronology of the construction of its individual parts. He claims that its bell tower originally had a defence function and goes even further
when he ascertains that it was in fact a part of an earlier object of defence. Soon after the end of World War II Tihomil Stahuljak did research on the church and executed the fi rst conservation-
restoration work (1946-1950). On the basis of the results he got, Stahuljak rejected the idea that the bell tower had had a defence function and correctly established the order of construction, but in the end concluded that the final question about whether the bell tower
was built before the nave or the other way around would be answered after the fl oor where the two come into contact was researched.
The dilemmas about the order of construction of individual church parts as well as those connected to the original function of the bell tower, which carries accentuated Romanesque features, led to a number of new conclusions without the execution of any new research of the church’s structures. Since recently, the construction of the bell tower is believed to have taken place in the fourteenth century (D. Samardžija Vukičević, 2005), i.e. after the construction
of the nave. The other hypothesis is that St. George’s Church in Belec is the kind of a church
that has a Chorturm (Z. Balog, 2009); according to that hypothesis, today’s bell tower used to be church’s sanctuary or the eastern entrance. St George’s Church was damaged in the earthquake of 1981, after which it got restored in compliance with the fi ndings of conservationist and archaeological research and the work
done on the presentation of the church. The research done on the fl oor of the church, where the bell tower touches the nave, led to the discovery of the basis of the eastern wall of the tower.
No basis of the western wall of the nave was found in that research. The data confi rmed that the ground fl oor of the bell tower is the oldest part of the church that had the nave with the sanctuary adjoined to it at the end of the thirteenth century. Next to the northern wall of the ground fl oor of the bell tower, a stone sarcophagus was discovered, but without the top. The sarcophagus is carved out of a stone block and has two chambers: a wider one, which has carved contours of a body with an emphasized spine and ribs and holes for the head and heels, and a much narrower chamber in which bones of a previously buried person were put. In the basement, there are unusually big doors with regard to the size of the space. That combined with the form of the window and the blind arches, which are located only near the top of the interior northern wall, lead to the conclusion that the Romanesque ground floor of the bell tower was originally built for the tomb of a Belec nobleman, no later than in the first decades of the 13th century. Traces of fi re on the interior walls of the ground fl oor, which were discovered under the plastered layer by Stahuljak, as well as the destroyed sarcophagus with a broken bottom, point to the fact that the damage might be from the Mongolian invasion of 1242.
Ključne riječi
St. George’s Church in Belec; changes; Romanesque features
Hrčak ID:
199533
URI
Datum izdavanja:
15.12.2010.
Posjeta: 1.753 *