Novo Brdo fortress
| Novo Brdo fortress | ||
|---|---|---|
 Restored facility in summer 2016 |
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| Creation time : | 1285 | |
| Castle type : | Hill castle | |
| Conservation status: | Ruin (partly rebuilt) | |
| Place: | Novo Brdo | |
| Geographical location | 42 ° 36 '54 " N , 21 ° 25' 0" E | |
| Height: | 1090 m. i. J. | |
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The fortress Novo Brdo ( Serb Тврђава Ново Брдо Tvrđava Novo Brdo , Albanian Kalaja e Novobërdës or Kalaja e Artanës ) is a medieval Serbian fortress in Kosovo . The ruins are located near the town of Novo Brdo around 20 kilometers east of Pristina . The fortress was built in the late 13th century to protect the region's gold, silver, iron and copper mines . Novo Brdo was especially famous for its silver deposits , the largest in Europe in the Middle Ages.
investment
The fortress consists of two areas, the upper town and the lower town . The upper town consists of the citadel with six towers on a fore summit ( 1090 m. I. J. ) of the Velika Planja ( 1260 m. I. Y. ) In volcanic rock . To the west of this is the lower town , which was surrounded by two other towers in addition to thick walls. In the east and southeast outside the walls was the suburb ( Serbian - Cyrillic Подграђе ).
Inside the citadel there is a small single-nave church, the palace and a heated bathhouse that was only found during the most recent excavations. In the lower town was the city cathedral of St. Nicholas , one of the most important sacred buildings at the end of the Serbian Middle Ages.
In the suburb, around 200 meters east of the citadel, was the city cathedral of St. Nicholas, one of the most important sacred buildings at the end of the Serbian Middle Ages.
Cathedral of Saint Nicholas
The foundation walls of the Cathedral of St. Nicholas were uncovered in two excavation campaigns in 1957 and 2014. The church consists of a single-nave older structure from the last quarter of the 14th century and an eastern extension, which was still being built until the final Ottoman conquest.
The church was planned as the main Orthodox church in Novo Brdo. It should also be the seat of a future ecclesiastical eparchy. However, as the population grew, the church soon became too small for Novo Brdo's needs. An ambitious expansion project was intended to enlarge the existing church to the east. The previous building would serve as a narthex, the extension as a naos.
The cathedral is a highlight of Serbian architecture of the Middle Ages. Its facade, made of very finely crafted stone blocks, was modeled on the memorial churches of the Serbian kings in Studenica , Banjska , Visoki Dečani and Sveti Arhanđeli . The facades of these churches were built from two to three different colored stone blocks in rows of red breccia and green andesite. The sculptures were subordinate to these massive blocks, but they are an element that did not appear in the earlier buildings. The facade design followed the scheme of the imperial memorial monastery in Prizren , Sveti Arhanđeli, but with new decorative elements that were only added with the Morava style. This includes the plastic decoration of the facade. The relief decoration of the windows, archivolts and rosettes belong to the style of the buildings that were erected under Prince Lazar . The building was therefore dated to the first years of Prince Lazar's reign.
The large extension could only be partially completed. Only the middle and northern ship were built. The southern ship was left unfinished. This extension differed from the cross-domed church type of the older church in its basilica floor plan.
history
In the 13th century, extensive mining activities began in Novo Brdo under the rule of Stefan Vladislav (1234–1243), who brought miners with German roots to the region. King Stefan Uroš II Milutin , who ruled from 1282 to 1321, had the fortress built in Novo Brdo at the beginning of his reign. Together with the castles of Prizrenac, twelve kilometers further to the southwest, and Prilepac, 13 kilometers to the southeast, the fortress of Novo Brdo formed a defensive complex around the profitable mining facilities.
The place was first mentioned in 1319. The place experienced its climax at the time of the Serbian despotate (1402-1459), when it was not only an important mining town, but also the second most important city in Serbia. Large colonies of Saxon miners and traders from Ragusa lived in the city . A voivode and a governor (kefalija), who was also the palace of the Serbian kings, held office in Novo Brdo as the regional administrative seat . The Venetians called the city Novomonte , the Saxon miners it was known as Nyeuberge .
After the fall of the Serbian kingdom in 1371, Novo Brdo found itself in the possession of the Serbian territorial prince Lazar Hrebeljanović , who had wrested it from the successors of King Vukašin. Lazar's birthplace Prilepac and Novo Brdo formed the ancestral territories of the princely family Hrebeljanović. Prince Lazar belonged to the court nobility of the emperors Stefan Dušan and Stefan Uroš V. After the death of Uroš V in 1371, Lazar negotiated with Vuk Branković , a dynasty residing in the neighboring Drenica , who held high state positions under Uroš V. Alliance that determined the following decades of Serbian history through the two princely families. In 1379, Lazar's principality extended from the Save and Danube in the north to Novo Brdo in the south. Vuk Branković, Lazar's stepson, held most of Kosovo from 1371, but the important sacred places of worship and Novo Brdo with the north of Metohija remained in the possession of Prince Lazar.
After the Ottomans' first invasion of Prince Lazar's territory in 1386, defense efforts were increased. The Ragusan traders, who made up an important part of the population in Novo Brdo, were asked to help reinforce the defensive walls. Important castles in the principality of Lazars were equipped with artillery weapons for the first time . With the beginning of the Ottoman invasions at the beginning of the 1380s, Novo Brdo became the temporary residence of the Gračanica metropolitans . The city cathedral Novo Brdos serves as the second metropolis during this time , the bishops call themselves Metropolitans of Lipljan and Novo Brdo.
In 1389 the Ottoman advance on the Amselfeld could be stopped. Although the principality under Milica Hrebeljanović had to recognize the suzerainty of the Ottomans under Bayezid I in 1390 , the principality retained its possessions. From the income of the silver works in Novo Brdo, the principality under Prince Lazar had also retained its patronage over the important Athos monastery Hilandar , which was on Ottoman territory. After Lazar's death in 1389 on the Amselfeld, Vuk Branković took on this obligation, as he had for a short time assumed the sovereignty over the church as well as the primacy status in the succession of Prince Lazar. It was not until the beginning of the 15th century that Novo Brdo's donations to Hilandar were resumed. Stefan Lazarević determined in 1405/06 that Hilandar would receive 100 liters (1 liter corresponds to 330 g ≈ 8 ducats) of silver from the Novo Brdos mines annually.
The town of Novo Brdo achieved its greatest prosperity and importance only after the battle of the Blackbird Field. It had become a household name throughout Europe for its silver and gold mines. The Venetian Franciscan cook Fra Mauro depicted Novo Brdo in his planisphere from 1459 in the middle of Serbia as the center of the country. Novo Brdo is written in large blue "cotte da oro e argento" (pits of gold and silver). At the beginning of the 15th century, the city received its own statute and city charter from the despot Stefan Lazarević , which is contained in the so-called mining law ("Zakon o rudnicima", Serbian Рударски законик деспота Стефана Лазаревића) from 1412. It is the oldest surviving statute of a Serbian city. The Novo Brdos silver mines, together with those in Rudnik and Srebrenica , supplied around 25% of the silver mined in Europe in the 15th century . The city's economic ties ranged from Istanbul via Edirne , Serres and Sofia to Italy. Novo Brdo was also a cosmopolitan center of Byzantine scholarship in the 15th century. With the late work of the Resava School under complete Ottoman rule, the place was for a short time the center of the synthesis of Slav-Byzantine literature, in which Demetrios Kantakuzenos (1435–1487) and Wladislaw Gramatik as well as other anonymous authors were a last at the end of the 15th century Connection to the Byzantine literary tradition (including copies of Pindar's Olympic Oden as well as Prometheus and Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus ).
The citadel in Novo Brdo served in the 15th century as a template for the fortifications in the memorial monastery Stefan Lazarević Manasija . Scheme and system were replicated.
The Ottomans besieged the fortress in 1412 without success. On July 27, 1441, the Serbian defenders of the fortress surrendered after a two-year siege. Despot Đurađ Branković succeeded, among other things, with Hungarian help in 1443 to defeat the Ottomans, whereupon they cleared the fortress again. In 1455 the Ottomans again conquered Novo Brdo. An eyewitness account of Konstantin from Ostrowitza , who was born nearby and worked as a writer, has come down to us:
“When the city had surrendered, […] [the Sultan] had the boys gather on one side and the women on the other […] 320 boys and 704 women were retained by the Sultan; The latter he distributed among the heathen [that is, his men], but he drew the boys with his Janissaries and sent them across the sea to Anatolia, where they were reared. I, too, were dragged from that city with my two brothers into captivity, I who wrote all this down. "
The final loss of Novo Brdo meant the real end of the Serbian Empire, which formally came to an end with the capture of Smederevo in 1459.
Most of the residents were abducted after the conquest, and the numerous villages in the area fell into desolation . Only residents working in the mining industry were granted the right to stay. The Ottomans managed to keep mining in the former Serbian towns of Novo Brdo, Srebrenica, Rudnik and Trepča . These mining towns were not Islamized to any great extent either. With the possibility of a secure income and the legal security of the mining locations , the eparches of the Serbian Orthodox Church moved here , who had previously avoided these locations under the rule of the Serbian despots. Novo Brdo was mentioned in Ottoman documents as the seat of a Serbian Orthodox bishop, along with other mining locations. The small Catholic parishes also remain. They are looked after by the Archbishop of Bar . Under Suleyman I , mining experienced an upswing comparable to that of the first half of the 15th century. The surrounding villages were also promoted as they supplied the mines with charcoal. At the end of the 16th century, the economic crisis of the Ottoman Empire also affected all mining towns. The traditional and important mining towns such as Novo Brdo and Trepča lost their importance. Not one of the mining towns survived the destruction in the Great Turkish War (1683–1699).
During the Great Turkish War, the abandoned fortress was occupied in 1686 by an Italian general in Austrian service with the help of Serbian partisans; the Ottomans recaptured the facility in the same year. As a result, mining in Novo Brdo was stopped. In 1892 the Turks used stones from the fortress for constructions in Pristina.
The fortress was declared a cultural monument in 1948. In 1952 the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts started archaeological studies of the facility. Remnants of defenses, buildings and mines are scattered in the area. There have been repeated illegal excavations.
Excavations
Novo Brdo is a well-preserved archaeological site. The castle and town gradually fell into disrepair, not through destruction, but rather after the population emigrated in the 17th century. At the initiative of UNESCO , the conservation of the ensemble and the renovation of the fortifications began in 2014. The scientific director was Marko Popović from the Serbian Institute of Archeology. The architect Gordana Simić was in charge of the conservation work on the fortifications. By 2016, the citadel with the three large structures found there had been prepared. Subsequently, the fortifications of the lower town will be secured by conservation. In addition to the small castle chapel, the discovery of a large heated bath was a great surprise. It is the first such bathhouse documented for Serbian history in the Middle Ages. The citadel and its inventory could be dated to the beginning of the 14th century. As Marko Popović reported, there are only five older inhabited houses with families of Turkish origin in Novo Brdo today. According to him, on the other hand, between 5,000 and 10,000 people lived around the fortress in the 14th and 15th centuries. Thus Novo Brdo had more inhabitants than Dubrovnik (6,000 inhabitants).
literature
- Marko Popović, Igor Bjelić: Црква Светог Николе: катедрала града Новог Брда / St Nicholas Church: The Orthodox Cathedral of the Town of Novo Brdo (= Studies and Monographs / Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of Serbia . No. 19 ). Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of Serbia, Belgrade 2018, ISBN 978-86-6299-031-0 .
- Александар Дероко: Средњевековни градови у Србији, Црној Гори и Македонији . Belgrade 1950, p. 170-173 (Serbian).
- Иван Здравковић: Средњовековни градови и дворци на Косов . Belgrade 1975 (Serbian).
- Никола Радојчић: Закон о рудницима деспота Стефана Лазаревића . Ed .: Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Belgrade 1962 (Serbian, text online ).
- Ђурђе Бошковић: Ново брдо . Бановинска штампарија, Skopje 1939 (Serbian). ; Đurđe Bošković: La Forteresse Novo Brdo . Skoplje 1939 (French).
- Kosta Kostić: Naši novi gradovi na jugu . Srpska književna zadruga, Belgrade 1922, Novo Brdo (Serbian, text on Wikisource ).
Web links
- Entry in the database of cultural heritage of Kosovo (English)
- Revitalization of Novo Brdo Fortress - Preliminary Management Plan: Part 1 (English, PDF), 2 (English, PDF)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Sima Ćirković: The Serbs. Blackwell, 2004, p. 54.
- ^ Mineral Site Passport: Artana (Novo Brdo). (PDF) (No longer available online.) Independent Commission for Mines and Minerals in Kosovo, p. 2 , archived from the original on December 28, 2013 ; accessed on November 12, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ D. Matović: Nemanjici se u kupali saunama. In: Novosti. July 21, 2016, accessed May 5, 2019 (Serbian).
- ↑ Marko Popović, Igor Bjelić (2018): p. 213.
- ↑ Marko Popović, Igor Bjelić (2018): p. 213
- ↑ Utvrdenja u Srbiji (PDF)
- ↑ Univerzitet u Beogradu Filozofski facultet: Zbornik Filozofskog faculteta . Naučno delo, January 1, 1968, p. 239 ( google.ch [accessed on November 12, 2016]).
- ↑ Oliver Jens Schmitt : Kosovo in the Middle Ages . In: Bernhard Chiari , Agilolf Keßelring on behalf of the Military History Research Office (ed.): Guide to history. Kosovo . 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Schöningh, Paderborn / Munich / Vienna / Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-506-75665-7 , pp. 6428-31 .
- ^ Franz Babinger: Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time. From the German by Ralph Manheim, edited with bibliographical references and index by William C. Hickman. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1992, ISBN 978-0-691-01078-6 .
- ↑ Marko Šuica: Vuk Brankovic, Slavni i Velikomožni Gospodin. Biblioteka Polihistor, IX, Evoluta, Belgrade 2014. ISBN 978-86-85957-57-4
- ↑ Marko Šuica (2014): p. 60.
- ↑ Marko Šuica (2014): p. 43.
- ↑ Marko Šuica, 2014: pp. 76–77
- ↑ Marko Šuica (2014): p. 91.
- ^ Marko Popović, Igor Bjelić (2018).
- ↑ Marko Šuica (2014): p. 147.
- ↑ Marko Šuica (2014): p. 146.
- ↑ Milorad Ekmečić : Dugo kretanje između kljanja i oranja - Istorija srba u novom veku (1492–1992) . Zavod za uđbenike, Belgrade 2008, p. 2.
- ^ Franz Babinger: p. 126.
- ^ RTS: Moravska Srbija, Manasija / V. Poglavlje on YouTube , April 24, 2019, accessed May 5, 2019.
- ^ Renate Lachmann: Memoirs of a Janissary or Turkish Chronicle. Styria Verlag, Graz / Vienna / Cologne 1975, ISBN 3-222-105529 , p. 113.
- ↑ Milorad Ekmečić : Dugo kretanje između kljanja i oranja - Istorija srba u novom veku (1492–1992) . Zavod za uđbenike, Belgrade 2008, p. 16.
- ↑ Milorad Ekmečić (2008): p. 26.
- ^ Franz Babinger: p. 127.
- ↑ Sima Ćirković: pp. 84-88
- ↑ Alma Lama: Foreign Raiders Plunder Kosovo's Heritage. In: Institute for War & Peace Reporting. August 2, 2005, accessed November 12, 2016 .
- ↑ Biljana Lijeskić: Novi život Novog Brda. In: Politika. March 11, 2016, accessed May 5, 2019 (Serbian).
