О зидању куће према Закону цара Константина Јустинијана
On Building House according to the Law of the Emperor Constantine Justinian

Summary/Abstract: There are several provisions in the Canon of the Czar Stephen Dušan that regulate relations between neighbors living in urban environments. Some are related to acceptable and unacceptable actions when building a new house, adding or modifying different sections of the house. In older manuscripts (Codex tripartitus — Dušan's Code, Shortened Syntagm of Matija Vlastar, and Justinian's Code), there are in chapter v(2), of the k(20) composition of the Shorter Syntagm of Matija Vlastar; and in the more recent manuscripts (Codex bipartitus—Dušan's Code and Constantine Justinian's Code), in the Constantine Justinian's code entitled O novodïlotvoreújihy. The provisions carried over from the Syntagm into the Constantine Justinian's Code have been abridged, changed, r reformulated. Some were not taken at all, so the Syntagm text is more detailed and more complete. Regulating conditions and ways for building reached its climax in Mediterranean lands, where city dwellings with houses were built close to one another. Such regulations were necessary for the Czar Dušan's judges, for they could be used in narrow medieval cities, such as Skopje, Ser, Prizren, and others. Beside that, since 13th century, mining towns and other economic centers develop in Serbia, so there was also an increased need for regulating building conditions. All building regulations are of Byzantine origin. Matija Vlastar probably followed existing legal solutions from the wide-covering chapter XXXVIII of Prochyron (9th century), much used Byzantine Code, listing various official norms, including various ones on building. Serb editors later took over a number f these rules, and put them in the abridged version of Matija Vlastar's Syntagm, within Czar Stephen Dušan's legal system. In the new edition, in the late 17th and in the 18th centuries, some of these regulations, slightly changed, were included in the Byzantine-Serbian legal compilation, called The Code of Constantine Justinian. All recent editions include articles regulating building of houses, and differences between different manuscripts are small, and more often lexical than legal.

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