Edirne Art Circle
Ottoman Empire · Bulgarian National Revival, Post-Byzantine art
The story
Edirne Art Circle is the label the National Gallery of Bulgaria uses for icon painters it cannot name one by one but can place in a single city. Edirne, the old Adrianople, lies in the European corner of today's Turkey, close to the Bulgarian and Greek borders. In the early 19th century it was an Ottoman city with a large Orthodox Christian population, Bulgarians and Greeks among them, whose churches needed icons, carved frames and iconostases, the screens of icons in front of the altar.
The gallery counts this circle's work as part of the art of the Bulgarian National Revival, the cultural awakening of Bulgarians under Ottoman rule, painted in the long tradition of the post-Byzantine icon. Edirne itself had been the Ottoman capital for most of a century before the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.
