On the Continent

(circa Sept. 17) I am finally on the same continent as my monasteries, though I am currently spending two weeks in Austria before leaving for Romania. This summer has been entirely non-academic, so I was relieved to find that in looking at churches and castles in Salzburg this past week, I was still able to make reasonably scholarly observations.

One thing I noticed in particular is the change in my taste in church architecture (from a purely aesthetic point of view). As a kid, I loved the Baroque ad naseum details of most Austrian churches, and found the less frequent Gothic churches to be stark and less pretty. However, after cultivating my Moldavian monastery obsession, anything which resembles the simple Gothic or somewhat Byzantine look of those monasteries immediately catches my interest. The Baroque paintings and mouldings and trifles and gold gilt strike me as kitschy compared to the characteristics of the Gothic churches. When I went into the churches of Salzburg, I had to applaud myself for being able to distinguish the different phases of building and renovation of each church (yay MRST degree).

So, in an effort to relate my present experiences with my (not too far in the) future project, I looked very carefully at the churches in Salzburg which struck me as being most similar to the monasteries. The Fransiskaner Kirche in Salzburg was built in the 12th century, and from a lookout on our mountain climbing hike, echoed the Moldavian monasteries, so I had to examine it more closely. The shape of the roof and the length to height proportion reminded me particularly of Boyars church. Upon closer examination, I realized the church more strongly resembles the Saxon cathedrals of Transylvania. Inside, the church has very Gothic rib vaulting (unfortunately, my training in Gothic architecture is still lacking) and support columns that struck me as strange: do all Gothic churches from this time have this sort of support structure, or was this a newer or bad design technique for this project? (Note also the Baroque kitsch added in later centuries)

Another interesting church was the Peters Kirche, built in 1491 (contemporary to most of the Moldavian churches [c. 1488-1609]). This church has more simple, narrower/taller Gothic windows [possibly a financial or expertise constraint: bigger walls and smaller windows indicate the lesser expertise in building of earlier centuries] that resemble those of the Moldavian monasteries. I think that in size, this church resembles the Moldavian monateries more as well. It struck me that there is a good chance that this church and the Moldavian churches may have had similar budgets, as Peters Kirche was not a cathedral (like the Salzburgerdom) nor was it a rich monastic order’s church (like the Fransiskaner Kirche), but just a local church of some sort, with fewer financial resources.

After all this scrutiny and questioning, the thought drifted into my mind- why does this matter, and what will it prove? Why am I critiquing the ‘taste’ of the Church décor and from where and by whom were the architectural plans designed? Either I am reducing these religious monuments to totally secular engineering projects or I have a list of facts that, added together, come to nothing.

However, the answer to this concern came up in my project proposal- the building of churches usually represents the height of a periods’ culture, society, and economy. They are surviving pieces of the epitome of a period. While letters, spoken words, and the thoughts of people in a given milieu are lost forever, in interpretations of the details of a structure, it is possible to determine what was important to a culture, towards what they felt worth devoting precious labor, money, and creative energy. By detecting the foreign influences in the design elements of a building, one can find where ideas originated and to where they went, and from this information determine where people were traveling and what areas were in contact with one another.