Original scientific paper
A New Understanding of the Triconch Church in Bilice
Mirja Jarak
; Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Abstract
The triconch church in Bilice near Šibenik was investigated in the first decade of the 20th century, and it is from these explorations that the ground plans of the architecture and some parts of the church furnishing stem. The church, in its typology and in the later phase marked by extensions, fits into a wider group of Early Christian sites with triconch churches in the eastern Adriatic, and has often been the subject of debate and interpretation in the literature. The first substantial article to provide information about the architecture and the phases of the construction of the religious complex in Bilice at the site called Dedića punta was published by L. Jelić just after the close of the investigations. The architectural remains were unprotected, however, and in time were completely covered with humus and Mediterranean vegetation. When in the 1970s, Z. Gunjača wrote a more extensive essay about the site, the triconch church was no longer to be seen. The importance of it was highlighted by a synoptic paper by Nenad Cambi about triconch churches in the eastern Adriatic published in the proceedings of the 10th International Early Christian Archaeology Conference.
Because of the importance of the site and its protection from total degradation, in 2016 and 2017 review investigations were conducted, exploring the space of the triconch church and most of the space of its extensions. These review excavations were conducted by the archaeology department of Zagreb University’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. They are still not completed, and a continuation of the research will lead to the complete investigation of the space of the narthex and the north-west extension as well as the surroundings of the church where it graves and other kinds of finds can be expected to be discovered. Certainly, this is a complex site, research into which has been to date restricted to the architecture of the church and the extensions.
The walls of the religious complex are extant to a height of an average of 50 cm. The manner of building is characterised by masonry work of roughly shaped rubble in copious layers of mortar. A little sounder manner of building is visible in the triconch church, the nave and apse of which have a more regular wall structure with somewhat larger pieces of stone on the outside and internal edge with a fill of smaller rubble. Two eastern annexes, the north-eastern and the south-eastern abut onto the wall of lateral conches, which corresponds to the earlier observation from the time of the first excavations of the site. In the south-eastern annex, more or less at the place at which it is drawn in on the Jelić ground plan, a walled circular shallow concavity was discovered, assumed to be the baptistery. Other details, especially the pilaster strips on the walls of church and extensions correspond to the depiction on his ground plan, except that their state of preservation is very different from that on the old ground plan. The exactness of the old ground plan from Jelić’s archives was confirmed to a great extent in the review excavations. Nevertheless, some deviations are observed, in the position of the baptistery in the south-eastern annexe and the position of the walled tomb in the north-western part of the complex. The most important deviation is a newly discovered wall, a small segment of which was found alongside the corner of the south-eastern extension. The wall, about 1.5 m long, extends from the corner of the south-eastern extension in parallel with the longitudinal wall of the south-western extension. It is slightly oblique and has no logical function with respect to the walls of the two southern extensions. It probably belonged to some earlier building phase that preceded the construction of the southern extensions. In future excavations the dig around the remains of the wall will have to be enlarged to see if it possibly has a continuation.
The total length of the triconch church with narthex comes to 24 m, and at its widest (in the area of the north-eastern and south-eastern extension) is a bit more than 16 m. Apart from the walls of the church and the extensions, also partially extant are remains of floors, particularly alongside the walls of the apse and in the north-eastern and south-eastern extensions. Traces of the positions of liturgical installations, particularly the altar screen, have not survived. In the central part of the triconch space, where in Jelić’s ground plan the position of the altar rail is drawn in, the floor is ruined, and quite a lot of stones, small and large, which constitute the stratum beneath the actual floor, have been found. Also visible here is a more regularly dressed and larger rectangular stone, which is perhaps on the very edge of the line of the altar rail and was perhaps part of the threshold in front of the screen. As well as finds of potsherds, tegulae and glass, the most important portable finds in the review excavations at Dedića punta in Bilice are of fragments of church furnishing. Three small limestone edge fragments have been found. Although small in size, they might be useful in the consideration of the church furniture of the triconch church.
The biggest fragment is also the thickest, and might have belonged to a pilaster of the altar screen. Two smaller fragments, with a similar arrangement of edge mouldings, are probably remains of the pluteus of the altar screen. Because of the marked height of the edge part that the newly found fragments have, the hypothetical pluteus might be linked with known reconstructed plutei with monograms on the top high edge. This is only the hint of a possibility for linking the newly found fragments with known preserved parts of the church furnishing from Bilice. Although very fragmentary, the new finds of stone monuments are important discoveries and supplement previous understandings of the church furniture at Bilice.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
240651
URI
Publication date:
29.6.2020.
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