Townplanningly – arthistic principles of the Renaissance

In the history of every nation, there are periods when its inner energy is being realized through creativeness, through fearless intervention in the world around us, because this world turns into a concentrations of the minds and desires of the citizens. In the making-up of this micro-universe, to which he is trying to be creator and a ruler, the beauty takes a specific place. It is identified now with the harmony, which the man creates, projecting its own personality into a small piece of the world, which he inhabits. Disturbed by numerous questions which solutions he has to discover, this “freed man” is much more unconfident and inner-unstable in a many more things than the medieval person, which trusted only in God. His consciousness needs an “ordered” world around himself, harmony in everything around him, to change the inner harmony which he can’t have.
The more progressing connections with the European and the freed Balkan countries, which “get more Europe-typed” with fast temps, increasing their dissatisfaction from the way of their existence and feed up their ambition for free and good life. They create new ideas about the architecture and the organizations of the houses and the villages. In all aspects of the spiritual life feels the uprising desire for change, which expresses in the works of art through a new era in the civil construction, enriching of its artistic forms in striving for luxurious objective world, remembering for the seen in the world of the rich and free people. The created during the first half of the 18th century network from trade offices of Bulgarians, expands and turns to Middle Europe and Russia presenting opportunities for many curious and enterprising people to reach the European way of living and to bring in Bulgaria the longing for its forms.
The development of the craftsmanship, its turning to specific, manifactured industry, turns to a basis for the realizations of this aspirations. In close to 90 branches, the craft-guild turns to burgeois forms of management of the profit, abbondoning the middle-aged organization and relations, in order to become a basis for city population, to work for the close and distant markets, to fulfill in the borders of the ottoman empire a united Bulgarian market, which is the main composition for the unification of the nationality and the formation of a nation.
The recovery and the historically existing network of roads, connecting the East and the West, blocked by the ottoman military middle-age for three centuries, began at the end of 17th century. This is the first sign for the upcoming changes which will take effect in 18th and 19th centuries. Next to the trading roads, which run through the Bulgarian lands, there are new ships rising, new villages were constructed, markets start to spring up, next ot which buildings for their attendance are built.
At the end of 17th century we can see some changes, which set the beginning of the construction of new city structures, different in social status and way of living of the middle-aged cities, inhabited and created by the ottomans in the Balkan lands. According to their place in the irregularly developed economic life of the empire, these villages turn to bourgeois, craft-trading towns and cities in different time. In the sub-Balkan fields and the mountains hollows, are built Bulgarian, craftsmanship villages very often. Around 60 little towns, along with the rendered Bulgarian big,old cities, are the places, where in the beginning of the 19th century is formed the new culture of the Bulgarian nation, bourgeois in its nature and national in its essence. 25 percent of the population of the Bulgarian lands lives in these villages and that’s why the thing which creates their new, spacial organization, incarnating in it their ideas for European, bourgeois city. The appearance of this towns and cities is formed by the urge for executing such constructional forms and for using such artist skills, that the end result could me as close to the existing in the minds of their people’s ideas for the imagine of the dreamed city as possible.
In the great number of artistic images of cities their dreams acquire image which is easy to see. The frescoes, which decorate the houses, churches and monastery walls, include very often painted architectural landscapes. Some of them represent eastern cities with numerous mosques and peaked minarets, with harbors full of ships and boats, but there are also images of European cities, which buildings have carefully painted “stylish” architecture. At some places, as at the house of Hindlian in Plovdiv, these surrealistic and semi-fantasy architectural drawings have carefully written names or can be identified by their architectural objects, famous with, like the bridge Rialto in Venice or the Aleksandrian lighthouse, but they were created mainly with unbridled fantasy, which combines styles and forms, in order to picture the dream about the city, which has to exist in this way in the close future over the Bulgarian lands. In this way the artists from the Renaisance contribute to the development of the architectural thought, push the imagination in areas, which are still unreachable for the real construction.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, the principles of spacial organization of the city environment change. The divison of the production processes sets the arranging of separate groups in the city’s space and the territories between the different cities, also changing the functional organization of the buildings and therefore their exterior form.
During the centuries of slavery, the planning system of the big, historically formed for thousands of years cities, actively colonized by the ottomans in the beginning if the conquering of the Bulgarian lands, gets close to the forms of the ottoman town – planning.
Typically for the town-planning is the lack of geometrical logic in difference with the antique system of organization of the city spaces, recreated by the European town-planning of the new time. The ottoman villages consist of residential buildings, built corresponding to the natural forms of the terrain, ignoring the separation of property indication, connected with narrow and curved streets, built through the most-optimum slope, without any preliminary idea, formed with extensions and dead-ends, comfortable for the owners of the nearby houses. Organizing elements of the spatial composition are the mosques with their arrow-shaped minarets and the connected with them spiritual buildings(medreseta) and shelters(imareti). The areas designed for trade-service, are the main market “suuk” and open markets, scattered freely through the whole city space. Taken into the lands of the Balkan peninsula from Asia, this town-planning system is set gradually in the cities, which defensive walls were destroyed and their representative middle-aged buildings were buried or ruined through the years. This is the development of all of the big cities, including Konstantinopol, turned to a capital of the Ottoman empire. It can be found in the villages in its most pure form, formed by the turks, after their invasion, next to the main war roads as Tatar Pazardzhik or turned into big was centers such as Shumen(Shumla).
It is common Balcan phenomena that, inside the cities with thousands of ages of history, the ottoman construction is not able to delete the made since the antiquity city structure and this structure, has a great influence later on taking over the ottoman spacial organization.
As two historically – cultural systems mix in the life of the Bulgarians, in the pattern of the villages we can see lines from the new, about to be born burgeois village construction. The Rennaisance combines freely these elements to give new life and unique look of its villages. For their extraordinary looks contributes the fact, that in the villages built in the antiquity, the ottoman presence could not erase the ancient city structures and the new elements are built over them, frequently repeating their forms. It is necessary only to show as an example Serdika-Sofia, which preserves the main distribution of the city lands, through all these years, established in the antiquities, the directions of the main streets, the position of the whole city market, the temple, situated over the ruins of the castle of Konstantin Veliki being rebuilt many times, the antique Serdian bath, the basilisk “St.Sofia” and the rotunda “St.Georgi” , even though they were turned into Muslim houses for prayers.
Filipopol – Plovidv, although in was named Filibe, preserves the antique three-hills as a place for rich Christian houses and churches – Bulgarian, Greek and Armenian, while the Turkish neighborhoods were formed outside these lands, in the foot of the hills and next to river Maritza.
The new idea, which the Rennaisance thought brings in the spacial organization of the villages is the aspiration for making different zones of the villages, according to their function in the production and trade life of the village, as well as the building of a center of the village, where the main public buildings are concentrated organizing the streets in a new manner. The workshops, the warehouses and offices, the trade-living buildings, are built next to the center of the city combining residential, trade and craftsman’s buildings. In this manner a zone is formed, connecting with the church territory, where also the school and church rooms are situated, the latter being used for meetings of the church board, the Bulgarian municipality and the board of directors “Велика Лонджа” of the craft-guilds.
The city center takes its place in this composite structure through the upright body of the city clock tower. Built in this manner are the cities, constructed during the 18th and the 19th century at the place of the villages, using the privileges of certain rights given to them by the government. Such cities are: Elena, Koprivshtica, Triavna, Panagiurishte, Kotel, Gabrovo, Dryanovo, Troyan.
The influence of the ottoman town-building is being felt in its strongest way in the villages, developed dirng the 18th century and stopped because of several reasons their active development. Their scheme remembers of the branches of a wood stem, without differentiation of the functions and without center. A typical example is Arbanasi, a village which had its highest prosperity during the 17th century, when its composite form is established which does not develop in the future.
Similar to this one is the typical composition of the mountain cities, built next to the shores of a river like Gabrovo, Troyan, Elena, some villages in the Rodopa mountains and some small villages in the plains. In the 18th and 19th centuries regardless the forms of the nature, which does not support the spreading of the village from its center, in these villages central craftsman’s areas were formed as well as a city center in which the public buildings of the Bulgarian people were constructed. The most significant development in this composite forms have villages with good craftsmanship such as Tryavna or trading centers such as Koprivshtica. During the 19th century these villages set the beginning of the Bulgarian town-building. Tryavna’s city center is not only functional center of the city, which caters for the interests of 25 000 people from the close villages, but a display of the esthetic needs of the citizens. The classification of the buildings by their height, by their location, the high tower, the water line, crossing the covered with stones square, the fountain under the tower, the slight curve of the bridge with stone parapet, the stone fence of the oldest building – the church and its monumental roof with lead-gray paving stones form a total effect pierced by harmonious piecework. Its unintentional beauty combines with the compilation of the materials – stone, black tree, white areas on the walls, little windows with wooden frames and dark wooden gratings and lots of green spaces in the yards and over the closest hills and trees.
More modest, but close to this scheme is the pattern in the smaller villages, which center is occupied by the church and the connected with it school.
Despite the Bulgarian trading-craftsmanship villages, the big cities are different in their styles. Different city principles of building are combined with different cultures in these cities. While during the early centuries of slavery dominating in the spacial solutions are the big Turkish municipal and sacral buildings, during the 19th century and especially through its second half, and in their style we can recognize the volumes of the church buildings with their bell towers and domes and the craftsman’s areas outline the central parts, directing the people to the heart of the city – the central square, marked by the city’s clock tower. The richness of this solution is fulfilled by the great mix with the terrain. Tarnovo, the old capital of the Bulgarian Kingdom is built at the heights around the curves of river Yantra in such manner, that it is one of the most-picturesque villages on the Balkan Peninsula, while Plovdiv is situated over three-hills and the close four hills, popping up the Thracian field, is so harmonically connected with them, that the buildings designed by the people complement the natural forms.
The most common spacial decisions of the Rennaisance villages distinguish with tranquil silhouette outlines, allowing them to be in harmony with the rounded lines of the mountains and the closed fields between them.Built from the almost equal volumes of the residential buildings and the surrounding buildings, amongst which we can diversify the bigger buildings of the churches and schools, they bring calmness with themselves, coming from co-ordination between the freed and occupied spaces, between the wide roofs and the stone walls. The rhythm, which determines the artistically influence of the village composition is created by the location of the holes on the walls of the different buildings, by the location of dense and semi-transparent parts in their composition, from the consoles under the eaves, which form sometimes goes beyond the constructive logic. It is formed also with the coloring of the different walls. In the different parts of the country exists preference for specific kinds of house-painting which gives different mood to the villages.
The northern Bulgarian villages have lots of white houses and give preference to blue lines around the windows and the doors, which combined with the green trees in the yard gives them freshness and cleanness in a friendly manner.
The houses in the villages situated in Stara Planina have white walls also with dark wooden frames. The doors and the wooden gates are also from dark wood and the roofs are made of gray stone tables. The common color is dark in harmony with the green-brown nature surrounding the village. Very characteristic is the picturesque solution of the houses from Rodopa mountain and the houses from The Pirin mountain in which architecture the main part is the stone – most of the walls are made from it and the high walls surrounding the yards of the houses and the churches and dark stone plates cover the streets and the roofs. The white parts on the walls have a few parts of white tree on them. The tall, narrow windows are made from the same tree. The three main tones – white, gray and gold-yellow distinguish from the dark-green pine-trees, outlining the strictly observed rhythmical system and the underlined impressiveness of the solutions.
The tone system in the villages in Southern Bulgaria is completely different, with strongly expressed taste for the mild tones and the variation of colors. In the 19th century the big South-Bulgarian cities: Plovdiv, Stara Zagora, Karlovo, Panagiurishte, Melnik are filled with glamorous city houses “painted” from the outside. The houses of Plovdiv and Koprivshtica are typical examples, because their houses are colored in mild tones: mild red, butter-colored green, gold-brownish, over which flowered elements are drawn, set into natural architectural frames. The symmetrical decision for these houses are underlined by decorative elements, which separate the different parts of the wall, symbolizing columns, wall piers and cornices, “painted again” by the elements of the classical architecture. This drawn architecture is complement one another by plastered wood columns, colored as marble, pediments from wood and plaster, repeating the forms of the classical stone pediments, and wood parapets of stairs with curves, looking precisely like the baroque bent parapets of the castles from Viena dating from the 18th century. Amongst the rich geometrical and plant elements, the artists add landscape images and even common-life paintings usually formed as separate medallions.
The underlined magnificence of the houses from Plovdiv, Melnik and Koprivshtica and their rich decorative trimming does not break the strict system under which the separate elements are added. We can see again the classical very old basis of the Bulgarian architecture, which manages to survive through the ages. Even though there are no essays written about that, the most-common proportions of the facade solutions of the houses from these ages are submitted to the rule of the “golden section”. This gives them harmony and silences the lack for stylish unity in the separate elements: the natural adding of the elements: houses, trade and production buildings, churches and buildings, fountains, house walls, bell-towers and clock-towers, grass, water sources and streams in common composition structures – squares, trading areas, church yards and so on without having to accept in any way a previously accepted idea. In the area of every village, every object has its specific function, has to serve a different part of people in the most precise way, the decisions are obeyed to strict functionality, there is nothing useless, nothing beautiful just because it has to be.