Църквата „Благовещение Богородично“ в с. Керека
The Church of Annunciation in the Village of Kereka

Summary/Abstract: Until recently, the Church of the Annunciation in the village of Kereka was one of the understudied monuments in Bulgaria of the first half of the nineteenth century. It was erected in the middle of the village, located 8 km from the town of Dryanovo. The paper gives a brief history and an analysis of the architectural specifics, establishing also the iconographic programme and trying to identify the team of painters commissioned to make the murals and the icons. The church has not been entirely painted. Оnly the south and north walls of the naos have been covered with paintings. Тhere are no icons now and the wooden base of the iconostasis has been broken into pieces. It is hard to reconstruct the iconostasis at the church in its entirety for want of information and archival photographs. In the early 1970s it has been entirely preserved, to which a scientifically grounded proposal drafted by the National Institute for Immovable Cultural Heritage testifies. The murals at the Church of the Annunciation in the village of Kereka are unsigned, but their iconographic and stylistic peculiarities associate them with the painters of the School of Tryavna. A number of pictorial specifics point to Krаstyo Zahariev and his sons Georgi and Petаr Krаstevs, painters from Tryavna, who completed the work in 1835–1837.

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