Археология евразийских степей (Aug 2022)
Amphorae-Resonators from the Church of St. John Prodromos in Kerch and the Issue of Monument Dating
Abstract
The architectural dominant of the medieval Bosporus was the Byzantine church, which from the end of the 18th century was referred to as the Temple of the Beheading of John the Baptist. For two hundred years, there have been disputes in the literature regarding the construction period of the temple. The most stable viewpoints on the dating of the monument in the 19th–20th centuries were: 8th, 10th–11th and 13th–14th centuries. In the 19th century, an extension was added to the medieval church, which greatly distorted the architectural appearance of the building. An important contribution to resolving the issue of the construction period of this temple was made by the excavations of the 1960s and 1970s. The studies were carried out both in the church itself and on the outside. The study of the temple was resulted from the need for restoration work, which were started at the site in the 1950s. According to T.I. Makarova, the materials obtained during the excavations indicated that the Church of St. John Prodromos was built in the Middle Byzantine period. During the clearing of the spandrels of the vault in 1969, four amphorae were discovered, and another two resonators in 1976, which were used to support the dating of the temple to the 9th–10th centuries (A.L. Jacobson) or 10th–11th centuries. (T.I. Makarova, V.V. Bulgakov, E.D. Artemenko). At the same time, the opinion of specialists who characterized the architectonics of the temple as a structure of the 13th–14th centuries (A.I. Komech, O.I. Dombrovsky, Yu.G. Lositsky, V.V. Sedov, A.Y. Vinogradov) steadily preserved in historiography. The proposed work presents the current study degree of the amphorae-resonators from the Church of St. John Prodromos and demonstrates the incompleteness of the process. This complicates the determination of the exact dating of these artifacts, which still does not go beyond the beginning of the 11th century. At the same time, an additional analysis of the architectural properties of the temple (V. Sedov) allows to attribute its construction to the end of the 13th century. Therefore, the resonators should also be dated to this century.
Keywords
