Đurđevi Stupovi and the Endowments

Nemanja was, before and above his wars, a builder of churches. In his appanage years he raised his first foundations in the Toplica region — the church of St. Nicholas at Kuršumlija and the church of the Holy Theotokos on the Toplica — and after his victory he built, on the height above his capital of Ras, the fortress-monastery of Đurđevi Stupovi, “St. George’s Towers,” in fulfilment of a vow. These endowments, made “for the soul,” were acts of piety, statecraft, and dynastic self-representation at once, and they established the pattern of royal church-building that the Nemanjić house would follow for two centuries.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox

The Toplica Foundations of the Appanage Years

Nemanja’s church-building began before his reign, in the eastern lands he governed as an appanage under his brothers (see The Path to Grand Župan). In the region of Toplica he founded two of the earliest Nemanjić monasteries, conventionally dated to the mid-1160s:

the church of St. Nicholas at Kuršumlija (Sveti Nikola), and
the church of the Holy Theotokos on the river Toplica (also associated with the Kosanica) (Simeon the Myrrh-flowing, OrthodoxWiki, dating the Holy Theotokos on the Kosanica and St. Nicholas–Kuršumlija to c. 1165; Stefan Nemanja, English Wikipedia).

These foundations are significant beyond their modest scale. The tradition records that Nemanja built at least one of them without his brothers’ permission, an assertion of independent lordship that prefigured his bid for the throne (Stefan Nemanja, English Wikipedia). And their architecture already shows the fusion that would define Serbian church-building: a Byzantine plan married to Romanesque forms drawn from the Adriatic coast, the meeting of East and West in stone that mirrored Serbia’s position on the frontier (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 7–8, 116–117; Ćurčić, Architecture in the Balkans from Diocletian to Süleyman the Magnificent, 2010). Kuršumlija, notably, was the court that Byzantine forces would burn in the Morava campaign of 1190/1191 (see Unification and Byzantium).

Đurđevi Stupovi: The Fortress-Monastery Above Ras

Nemanja’s most striking early foundation as ruler was Đurđevi Stupovi — “St. George’s Towers” (or “Pillars”) — built on a commanding height above his capital at Ras, conventionally dated to about 1170/1171 (Simeon the Myrrh-flowing, OrthodoxWiki, dating Đurđevi Stupovi to 1171; Stefan Nemanja, English Wikipedia). The monastery was dedicated to St. George, and the tradition explains its foundation as the fulfilment of a vow: Nemanja is said to have promised to build a church to St. George if he were delivered from captivity (in some accounts, imprisonment by his brothers before his triumph at Pantino), and Đurđevi Stupovi was the votive discharge of that promise (Stefan Nemanja, English Wikipedia; the Serbian tradition).

Its very form declares the character of Nemanja’s rule. Set on a hilltop and flanked by the two tall towers that gave it its name, Đurđevi Stupovi was a fortress-monastery, a house of prayer that was also a stronghold and a statement of power overlooking the royal town of Ras — piety and lordship built into a single silhouette (Ćurčić, Architecture in the Balkans, 2010). Architecturally it belongs, with the Toplica churches, to the formative phase of what would become the Raška school: a domed, single-nave Byzantine core clothed in the carved stone and Romanesque detailing of the Adriatic west (Ćurčić, Architecture in the Balkans, 2010; Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 116–117).

The Meaning of the Endowment: The Zadužbina

To understand why a warring prince poured his treasure into monasteries, one must understand the medieval Serbian (and wider Orthodox) institution of the zadužbina — a foundation established “for the soul” (za dušu) of its founder, endowed with lands, villages, and revenues held in perpetuity so that the monks would pray for the founder’s salvation forever (see St. Sava: Founding Hilandar, on the same institution at Hilandar). To build and endow a church was thus a spiritual investment of the most serious kind: it secured perpetual intercession for the founder and his house, and it was understood as an act of repentance and almsgiving as much as of magnificence. Nemanja’s foundations were his zadužbine, and the pattern he set — every Nemanjić ruler building and endowing at least one great monastery as his own resting-place and prayer-house — became the defining form of medieval Serbian royal piety and the reason Serbia is dotted with royal monasteries to this day (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4; Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 116–117).

Piety, Statecraft, and Dynastic Self-Representation

Nemanja’s building was, characteristically, several things at once, and the collection does not reduce the one to the other. It was genuine piety: the acts of a man who took the salvation of his soul seriously and who would, at the end, give up his crown to die a monk (see The Great Renunciation). It was also statecraft: monasteries anchored royal authority in newly won or contested regions, provided centers of administration and learning, and bound the church to the crown. And it was dynastic self-representation: a fortress-monastery on the height above the capital, or a marble mausoleum in the mountains, declared the permanence and the sacral character of the ruling house (Ćurčić, Architecture in the Balkans, 2010; Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4). The same convergence of motives runs through all medieval royal foundation; naming it is not cynicism but precision. Nemanja built for his soul, for his state, and for his dynasty, and the three purposes were, in his world, not felt to be in competition.

The Raška School: A Frontier Architecture

The monasteries Nemanja founded gave rise to a distinct architectural tradition, the Raška school (raška škola), which would dominate Serbian church-building for a century and more (Ćurčić, Architecture in the Balkans, 2010; Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 116–117). Its signature is precisely the frontier fusion already visible in the Toplica churches and Đurđevi Stupovi and brought to perfection at Studenica (see Studenica, the Marble Mausoleum): a Byzantine spatial core — the domed, cross-in-square or single-nave plan of the Orthodox East — clad in a Romanesque skin of dressed stone, sculpted portals, and carved window-frames drawn from the Adriatic and Italian west. The Raška church is thus, in stone, exactly what Nemanja’s Serbia was in politics and religion: an Eastern Orthodox substance in a form open to the West, the architecture of a people on the seam between two worlds who had chosen the Eastern faith without abandoning the Western craft (Ćurčić, Architecture in the Balkans, 2010). Nemanja’s foundations are the beginning of that tradition, and their builder is, among his other titles, the founder of Serbian monumental architecture.

References

Ćurčić, Slobodan. Architecture in the Balkans from Diocletian to Süleyman the Magnificent. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. On Đurđevi Stupovi, the Toplica churches, and the Raška school as a Byzantine-Romanesque fusion.
Fine, John V. A., Jr. The Late Medieval Balkans. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987, pp. 7–8, 116–117. On Nemanja’s foundations and their setting.
Obolensky, Dimitri. Six Byzantine Portraits. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, chapter 4. On Nemanja as church-builder and the zadužbina pattern.
Simeon the Myrrh-flowing and Stefan Nemanja. OrthodoxWiki and English Wikipedia (used to locate the foundations and their dates: St. Nicholas–Kuršumlija and the Holy Theotokos c. 1165; Đurđevi Stupovi c. 1170/1171).