The saint made of tiles

In 1909 Yordan Gospodinov, a schoolteacher from Preslav, began digging at a place called Patleina, south of the walls of the old capital. In the rooms around a small church he found tiles of fine white clay, painted and glazed. Some carried letters. Slowly the pieces came together into a face: a man with a long pointed beard, large eyes and a round halo. Greek letters survive on three other tiles, from which the name Saint Theodore is reconstructed. The 1997 catalogue describes the icon as assembled from about a hundred fragments. It is kept at the National Archaeological Institute with Museum of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia. Why was the saint painted on separate tiles? And do we know who the painter was?

Patleina was a workshop as well as a monastery. Archaeologists found basins where white clay was washed and left to settle, and kilns for firing. The clay was local and rich in kaolin. Tiles were shaped and fired, then painted, glazed and fired a second time. About a dozen workshops of the 9th and 10th centuries are known around Preslav. One stood right by the Round, or Golden, Church, whose decoration combined carved marble, glass mosaic and painted tiles. Craftsmen made wall facings, cornices, floor inlays and small icons. When the first tiles came to light, many people took them for imports from Byzantium. Excavations showed they were made on the spot.

The tiles also speak about books and writing. In 886 Boris welcomed Clement, Naum and Angelarius, disciples of Cyril and Methodius who had been driven out of Moravia. With the support of Boris and his successors, centres of Slavic learning developed at Pliska, Preslav and Ohrid. Gradually, Slavic entered worship and literary life. Monks in Preslav translated from Greek and wrote new texts. Some ceramic tiles carry church texts in Cyrillic. Cyrillic is linked to the work of the disciples of Cyril and Methodius in Bulgaria towards the end of the 9th and the start of the 10th century; it is based on Greek capital letters. Who exactly put it together, and in which centre, is still debated. The name of Saint Theodore on our icon, though, is reconstructed from a Greek inscription.

During the Middle Byzantine period, two military saints named Theodore were venerated: Tiron and Stratelates. Both were usually depicted armed. In the surviving part, our saint wears a mantle and carries no weapon, so scholars disagree about which of the two he is. One suggestion is that the painter followed an older model from a time when only one Theodore was venerated and shown in civilian dress. The origin of the technique is also debated: Constantinople, the art of the East, or a local Preslav tradition. The 1997 catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art calls the icon the oldest surviving monumental icon of the newly converted state. Preslav remained the capital for about eighty years. In 971 the Byzantine army captured Preslav. According to archaeologist Katya Melamed, the Patleina monastery was also destroyed then; she links the end of Preslav painted ceramics to the city’s decline in the late 10th century.