The book by Moutafov E. S. The Chora Monastery of Constantinople. Cambridge University Press; 2024, ISBN: 9781108931137, 90 pp. is now available in electronic version. The monograph by Prof. Emmanuel Moutafov of the Institute of Art Studies – BAS is the fourth in The Elements of the History of Constantinople of the Cambridge University Press series. It was written at an invitation of 2018 by the series editor, Prof. Peter Frankopan of Oxford University (Silk Roads: A New History of the World, 2015; New Silk Roads: Future and Present of the World, 2018). The leading British historian invited Prof. Moutafov to write the book on this Constantinople monument because of his previous publications on the monastery. Other invitees included, for example, Prof. Albrecht Berger of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich who wrote for the series The Statues of Constantinople. Cambridge University Press, 2021. The work on the monographic study on the monastery of Chora by Prof. Moutafov continued for several years while the monument was still a museum. In the meantime, an expanded version of his text has been published in this country under the title Theotokan Container of the Uncontainable: Human Dimensions of the Palaeologan Art in Constantinople, S., 2020 (IAS-BAS); 2022 (“Prof. Marin Drinov” APH). And in the Bulgarian editions of the study, the author puts forward his thesis that the monastery is mainly dedicated to St. Mary, and that its funerary chapel has a specific connection with representatives of the Asen dynasty. In this sense, the publication of the core of his ideas in English by Cambridge University Press is a recognition of the scholar’s discovered and proven connection to Bulgarian medieval history as well as proof that new facts and connections can be added to even the most published monuments in Byzantium. A lot of new bibliography has been added to the English edition, a complex and centuries-old story has been told in an engaging and accessible way, and the photographic material is the author’s own work. The epigraphic material is presented in its entirety, translated and adequately interpreted. For the first time, a connection is made between the iconographic program of the church and a menologion from a manuscript that is kept today in Sofia; later iconographic manuals are used to reconstruct the iconographic program; a connection is made with icons originating from the Constantinople temple and kept today in Athens and the Rila Monastery, etc.
Cambridge University Press (CUP) is the oldest university publishing house in the world. Founded in 1534 by King Henry VIII as the ‘King’s Press’, it has published over 50,000 titles by authors from around a hundred countries. CUP authors include names such as John Milton, Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, and many Nobel laureates in economics, physics, medicine, and chemistry. And although some journals and collections published by CUP have printed articles by Bulgarians, Prof. Moutafov’s The Chora Monastery of Constantinople is the first monographic study by a Bulgarian published by the prestigious university institution. It is not identical, for example, with Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
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