SAINT GEORGE S MONASTERY ABOVE KAMENICA

SAINT GEORGE'S MONASTERY

ABOVE KAMENICA

Saint George's Monastery is located nearby Niš, in the picturesque valley above the village of Kamenica. Having been long unknown to the public, it was discovered in archeological excavations only recently, in 1988. It was erected in the second half of the 15th century, just below the Roman water-supplying system, still in use in this area, which provided water to the town of Niš in the Roman times, as well as to the population of the Monastery in the later period.

THE MONASTERY OF ST. GEORGE

Sources classify it among the biggest monasteries of the Niš region. It was mentioned for the first time in Turkish registers from 1498, 1515, 1564, as well as at the end of the 16th century. The Monastery represented an important center of scribes and illuminators. The books, written and decorated here by the hierodeacon Arsenije in 1515 and 1553, reached the Monastery Šišatovac, probably along with the people running away from these parts because of the Turkish oppression. The inscription from 1553, written on the Menaion for the month of September, is as follows:

The Saint George's Monastery church is a modest single-nave building with a semicircular apsis in the east and a parvis in the west. A Roman sacrificial altar was used as a holy dining table, and Roman bricks paved the floors of the naos and parvis. The burial ground was located to the north of the church.

The pavement of Roman bricks in the church parvis, archeological works in 1988

The temple of St. George is built of the material taken from some nearby Roman structure, maybe from a temple that used to be placed next to a spring of water. This supposition is certified by massive stone blocks, scattered to the north from the church, as well as by a white marble statue of a woman in the natural size, found in 1889. The marble slab with the Monogram of Christ, discovered here, now stands as the pulpit rosette in the Church of St. Nicholas in Kamenica. Archeological excavations also uncovered a marble fragment of a stripe-profiled doorpost and a capital of fine-grained marble with a cross carved in the shallow relief, as a tree of life.

Saint George's Monastery took on the role of a scribing, illumination, literary and educational center, with the primary aim to preserve religious, cultural and national identity of Serbian people in their living environment. These reasons attach enormous significance to this, we might say, university of Niš of former times.