SAINT-NICOLAS CHAPEL

St. Nicholas Chapel (Црква Светог Николе/Crkva Svetog Nikole, Kisha e Shën Nikollës) is the smallest church in the Patriarchal Monastery of Peć. It is also the only one not served by the narthex. Adjacent to the southern part of the Church of the Mother of God-Hodegetria, it was erected in the same period as the latter and the narthex, between 1330 and 1337, and for the same patron, Archbishop Danilo II. In front of the entrance is the sarcophagus of Patriarch Maximus, who had the interior of the chapel redecorated in the 17th century. Main curiosity: an amazing cycle of frescoes dedicated to St. Nicholas.

HistorySt

Nicholas of Myra.

The chapel is dedicated to this 4th century figure, bishop of Lycia (now in Turkey) and reputed to be a miracle worker, i.e. the author of miraculous cures. But the dedication here is primarily a tribute to the Serbian king Stefan Dečanski (1220-1331) who had made St Nicholas his patron. The ruler claimed to have been miraculously healed by him. A miracle that assured him the support of the clergy to ascend the throne and immense veneration from the Serbian people.

Various influences.

The original frescoes from the 1330s have been lost. Damaged, they were replaced in 1673-1674 by works by Radul, the most prolific - and uneven - Serbian artist of the 17th century. The result is artistically mediocre, but interesting from a historical point of view. The frescoes reveal influences from the Italian Renaissance, Serbian folk beliefs, Russian-Ukrainian folklore and Ottoman customs.

Frescoes from the life of St. NicholasIn

a tiny space of only a few square meters, there are compositions similar to those in other churches, including depictions of the sponsors and Serbian saints and kings. But what is really worthwhile here is the cycle of the life of St. Nicholas that stretches from the nave to the sanctuary.

Vault of the nave - south.

To the right after the entrance, the southern part of the vault is divided into nine equal "squares". These illustrate typical episodes in the life of St. Nicholas: education, ordination... Note the painter Radul's ignorance of ancient Greek art when he depicts the saint destroying a temple dedicated to Artemis: a statue of the goddess of Nature and the Hunt appears, ridiculous, on a "Corinthian" column. The failed evocation of the "miracle of the three virgins" (third scene on the right of the middle row) is inspired by the admirable work painted almost four centuries earlier by Palmerino di Guido in St. Nicholas of Assisi. In the last two scenes dedicated to the "miracle of Basil", the young Christian held by an Arab emir is rescued by St Nicholas who brings him back to his parents seated around a sofra (round Turkish table) on which knives and forks are laid out. This typically Ottoman table art was unknown in the West in the 17th century, but was widespread in the Balkans.

Vault of the nave - north.

The lower part is occupied by a classic scene of St Nicholas arriving with boats to save the city of Myra from famine. The upper left-hand box tells of the saint's ordination as a bishop. The other five scenes describe the Russian-Ukrainian legend of a miracle that took place in Kiev in the 11th century. The city of the Russian grand princes had just been destroyed by the Coumans, a Turkic-speaking people driven out of Central Asia by the Mongols. A Couman prisoner of the Russians is released in exchange for a promise of ransom made in front of an icon of Saint Nicholas. But once freed, he refuses to pay and it takes two miraculous interventions by the saint (one of which involves a fall from a horse) for the Cumin to pay off his debt. This series of the "Kiev miracle" certainly illustrates the influence of Russian culture: in the 17th century, the tsars became the protectors of the Serbs under Ottoman domination. But the Coumans were already well known to the primates of Peć. Several Serbian monks who served on Mount Athos recounted the arrival of the Coumans on the Aegean coast in the 12th century. Their texts lamented that this people refused to pay the taxes due to the Byzantine monasteries.

Vault of the sanctuary. The cycle of Saint Nicholas continues here, on both sides of the vault. But the access to the sanctuary is closed by the worthless iconostasis. Through the partition, however, one can see some frescoes. The apse is surmounted by the Deisis, the common "prayer" of Christ, the Mother of God and Saint John the Baptist for the salvation of Christians. To the right of St. John the Baptist, on the south vault, one of the two scenes of the oldest representation of the "miracle of Stefan Dečanski" can be seen. St Nicholas manifests himself to the king, who is bedridden, blindfolded, in a setting of Byzantine buildings. The story goes that, suspected of treason, Stefan Dečanski was enucleated on the orders of his father Milutin in 1319 and sent to the Pantocrator Monastery in Constantinople. No one knows whether Dečanski actually lost his sight. But the legend, told in the following scene (which is difficult to see), states that the future king recovered his sight by the application of the saint's hands. Many miraculous cures were later attributed to Dečanski himself, especially in the grandiose monastery he had erected in Dečani.