Depictions of military martyrs were among the most popular subjects in icon painting in Rus’. Between the 11th and the 17th century local workshops adopted canonical Byzantine models and gradually developed and changed them depending on local factors and conditions. The present article attempts to classify the most common iconographic types and to describe the dynamic of the changes in the iconographic canon on the basis of a qualitative and quantitative analysis of extant and known works.
I conducted my own ethnographic field research in 1998, 2004 and 2007. Further field research, from 2010 to 2012, under the title ‘Folk Piety and the Transmission of Ethnoheritage in Upper Meñimurje’, was part of Tomo Vinšćak’s academic project Sacral Interpretation of Landscape, organized by the Matapur Association and the Ethnological and Anthropological Department of the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. The analysis and comparison of the collected materials has contributed to research into the fascinating and still vibrant – though under-researched – survival strategies of pre-Christian and Christian worldviews in the western and north-western parts of the northernmost districts of Croatia.
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