Икони от светогорския монах Доситей от Печ в Самоков
Icons of the Athonite Monk Dositheos from Peć in Samokov

Summary/Abstract: The article presents six Despotic icons from the iconostasis of the Church of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God in the Virgin Convent in Samokov, dating from 1819. In the scholarship these icons are considered to have been made by an unknown painter or are incorrectly attributed as the work of the Samokov painters Hristo Dimitrov, Dimitar Hristov or Ioan Iconopisetc (the Icon Painter). In fact, they were made by a little-known today Mount Athos painter of Serbian origin – Dositheos from Pec. Almost nothing is known about him, but it is assumed that he was a monk in the hermitage of St. John the Forerunner to the monastery of Iviron and he was in a creative relationship with the studio of Nicephorus from Karpenisi. This new attribution brings clarity and expands our idea of the influence of the masters of Mount Athos on the religious art in Samokov and the region. One of the icons from Dositheos in the church in Samokov depicts the scene of the Flagellation of Christ. An iconographic source for it is found in the works of the brothers Hans Holbein Jr. and Sigmund. Their models were probably later reworked into an engraving, which was reinterpreted in the Samokov icon by Dositheos. The specific model has not yet been discovered, but it is certainly not the engraving from the Russian gospel originating from the Rila Monastery (1744), as is believed in Bulgarian scholarship.

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