THE STANDING STONES OF MEDIEVAL BOSNIA: HERESY, DUALISM AND SYMBOLS IN PRE-OTTOMAN BALKANS
Gorčin Dizdar
A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Graduate Program in Humanities York University, Toronto, Ontario May 2016 © Gorčin Dizdar 2016 ABSTRACT
The aim of this dissertation is to interpret the enigmatic imagery of the stećak, the roughly 60,000 monumental, monolithic standing stones found on the territories of modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina and its neighbouring regions. Around 30% of the stones are adorned with low reliefs depicting a variety of symbols such as crosses, crescents, rings and rosettes, as well as more complex figural compositions involving orantes, circle dances and stag hunts. The rare and terse inscriptions found on the stones allow us to date their production between the 13th and 15th centuries and to link their creation to the medieval Bosnian state and its indigenous religious organization known as the Bosnian Church.
My thesis is that the Bosnian Church adhered to what is known as a moderately dualistic theology. In order to justify this interpretation, I firstly analyze the terms ‘heresy’ and ‘dualism’ in their historical context(s). Secondly, I provide a re-reading of the primary documents linked to the Bosnian Church, arguing that it was related to other medieval dualist movements such as the Paulicians of eastern Anatolia, the Bogomils of Bulgaria and the Patarens/Cathars of Western Europe. Finally, I interpret the stećak imagery in accordance with this view, demonstrating that it can be understood as a symbolic language with several layers of meaning.
The dissertation encompasses historical, theological, iconographic and anthropological questions, shedding new light on the nature of medieval heresy/dualist Christianity, the history of medieval Bosnia, and the symbolism of a neglected aspect of European material culture.
ii Dedicated to my father.
iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to use this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to the numerous individuals and institutions without whom the completion of this dissertation would not have possible.
First of all, I thank Professor Amila Buturović, my supervisor, teacher and friend, for allowing me to work on this challenging topic in a flexible way, encompassing several distinct academic disciplines, a privilege normally reserved for more seasoned scholars. In this respect, my gratitude has to be extended to the entire Department of Humanities at York University, dedicated as it is to the promotion of academic interdisciplinarity.
Furthermore, I thank all the members of my commitee for the various contributions they have made to the final dissertation: Professor Thomas Cohen, who carefully read the first drafts of most chapters and helped to somewhat lighten my occassionally heavy prose, Professor Markus Reisenleitner who provided some useful advice on methodological apects, and Professor Shirley- Ann Brown, who gave some very valuable advice on art-historical questions. I was particularly honoured that, despite his many obligations, Professor Yuri Stoyanov from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London found the time to serve as my external commitee member.
Finally, I owe my gratitude to the government of Canada for awarding me the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, which allowed me to not only carry out my research freed from financial worries, but also to undertake several trips to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where I could make use of the invaluable library of the Bosniak Institute in Sarajevo and personally visit numerous stećak sites. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface 1 Chapter 1: Medieval Tombstones, Heresy and the Bosnian Church: An Introduction 6 Chapter 2: The Concept of Heresy 31 Chapter 3: The Dualist Tradition 63 Chapter 4: The Bosnian Church 96 Chapter 5: The Glosses of the Bosnian Christians 124 Chapter 6: John Fine’s The Bosnian Church - A New Interpretation 138 Chapter 7: Iconology Revisited 162 Chapter 8: The Stećak Stones: Introduction 191 Excursus: Khachkar, Ororots, and Medieval Armenian Art 218 Chapter 9: The Iconography of the Stećak Stones - Part 1 227 Chapter 10: The Iconography of the Stećak Stones - Part 2 261 Conclusion 300 Appendix: Transcriptions of medieval inscriptions and documents 307
v LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Illustrations of Chapter 1 317 Illustrations of Chapter 8 322 Illustrations of Excursus 328 Illustrations of Chapter 9 331 Illustrations of Chapter 10 345
vi PREFACE
The aim of this dissertation is to interpret the enigmatic imagery of the stećak, the roughly 65,000 monumental, monolithic tombstones found on the territories of modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina and its neighbouring regions in Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro. The stećak are scattered around the local countryside in necropoli counting tens and occasionally up to several hundred stones. They come in several basic, precisely cut shapes: slabs, rectangular or house- shaped blocks, crosses and pillars, measuring roughly 1.5 - 2 meters in width, length and height and weighing up to several tonnes. The rare and terse inscriptions found on about 200 stones (written in medieval demotic Slavonic using a local variant of the Cyrilic script) allow us to date their production between the 13th and 15th centuries and to link their creation to the medieval Bosnian state and its indigenous religious organization known as the Bosnian Church.
Around 30% of the stećak stones are adorned with low reliefs depicting a variety of symbols such as crosses, crescents, rings and rosettes, as well as more complex figural compositions containing oranti, circle dances and stag hunts. Previous stećak scholarship has interpreted this imagery in two basic, mutually opposed ways: either as primarily naturalistic representations of secular activities of medieval Bosnian society, enriched by a combination of Christian and pagan symbols, or as a symbolic language linked to the mythological worldview of Bosnian Christians. My basic proposition is that the meaning of the imagery is not a fixed and static property mysteriosly attached to the stećak stones, but rather a dynamic construct emerging from an interaction between the object’s material properties and the observer’s hermeneutic framework. In this way, the previously opposed interpretations of stećak imagery can be conceived of as complimentary: an image can simultanously represent a quotidian activity, call to mind a socio- political metaphor, and evoke a complex religio-symbolic concept. My aim is to uncover some of these ‘meanings’ that were ascribed to stećak imagery by its contemporary observers.
As there is not a single extant document testifying to medieval Bosnians’ attitudes to the stećak stones and their imagery, they have to be derived from the wider cultural and religious contexts