International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Branka Gugolj
University of Priština, Faculty of Art, Zvečan, Serbia; 
[e-mail]
The Monastery Rudenica Church and Its Place 
in the Morava Serbia Architecture
The Monastery Rudenica church was built at the turn of the 15
th
century, which is indicated 
by the ktetors’ portraits painted between 1403 and 1405. It is an endowment of Lord Vukasin, a 
Despot Stefan’s treasurer, and his wife Vukosava. Its ground plan is in a shape of a reduced triconch, 
with one dome. A narthex built in the same period is vaulted without window openings. The dome 
square drum is circular on the inside and octagonal on the outside. Horizontal façade is split with 
a string course, above which are rosettes and blind arcades, while in the lower section there are 

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bifora windows with stone tracery decorations. The church was built of undressed sandstone and 
limestone and only the edges were reinforced with dressed sandstone blocks. The plastered façades 
in fresco technique try to imitate the alternating stone and brick style. 
Through centuries, the upper sections of the structure were destroyed and later on restored when 
restoration and conservation works were conducted first in 1936-1937 and in 1994-1995. Rudenica 
came into focus quite early, so already in 1877 there is a note that it is “one of the beautiful flowers 
in a fragrant wreath that has not yet taken its rightful place in the history of architecture.” Soon after 
that, its indisputable similarity with the Ljubostinja church was noticed, reflected in shaping the 
exterior façades. Then a question is posed, what are the reasons for it? There had already been some 
earlier examples of noblemen’s endowments modelled by the rulers’ ones, so the Rudenica church is 
not an exception. Research in the architectural heritage of the Morava Serbia show that Ljubostinja 
was not the only possible model and that analogies of its architectural elements – ground plan, 
upper structure, openings, material used, technique and manner of construction, stone tracery and 
painting decorations – could be found on chronologically and topographically similar churches, 
as well as on those more remote ones. And that very study of elements makes it possible to view 
Rudenica in a new light and to give a more precise answer to the question of its place in the Morava 
Serbia architecture.