PORTRAITS OF SERBIAN LAY PEOPLE AS EVIDENCE OF THEIR SOCIAL STATUS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

PORTRAITS OF SERBIAN LAY PEOPLE AS EVIDENCE OF THEIR SOCIAL STATUS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE Key words: portraits, Christians, lay people, Serbs, Ottoman Empire, costume Written and visual sources from the time of Ottoman rule testify to numerous Serbian laypeople that built or renovated churches or financially supported the fresco painting of sacral buildings. Under the conditions imposed by Sharia law, individuals who preserved their ancestral faith while likely maintaining a high financial status and social reputation were no longer considered nobility in the same sense as in the medieval Serbian state. However, as founders, donors, and occasionally officials in the administrative apparatus, they represent a continuation of the tradition of nobility in a transformed form. The appearance of some of these lay people is recorded in portraits. The way they were depicted, especially their costumes, reveals the extent of their similarities and differences with nobles of the past and whether they embraced influences from the capital and other regions of the vast Ottoman Empire. This research is relied upon the results of Jovan Kovačević’s long-standing study of medieval costumes of the Balkan Slavs (1953). It is based on a comparison of our examples with then portraits of Christians in churches in neighboring regions, also under Ottoman rule, in the territories of present-day Bulgaria, North Macedonia, and northern parts of Greece. Particular attention is paid to illustrated books on customs of foreign peoples and costume albums, popular in Western Europe since the mid-16th century, which provide more or less authentic data, among which those that can be trusted are singled out. The legal regulations on dress codes for non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire are also discussed, along with the question of how strictly these restrictions were enforced, both in the capital and in the provinces. The dataset PORTRAITS OF SERBIAN LAY PEOPLE AS EVIDENCE OF THEIR SOCIAL STATUS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE is a result of the project Reshaping Nobility: Formation of the New Christian Elite in Ottoman Serbia (15th–18th Century), conducted by the Institute of History, Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade and Academy of Arts, University of Novi Sad, and funded by the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia.