The architectural concept of the church - Duality

The rich traditions of the Eastern Greek liturgy and the Eastern rite created a diverse and complex architectural character in church history. The main elements of this character are the central arrangement, the additions, the intended - and accidental- "grown" extensions. The vault of the central square, as a representation of the kingdom of heaven, the use of imperceptibly filtering light, the symbolic representation of the gates have all become an architectural tool and can be seen layered on top of each other in the churches that have been known and operated so far. When designing a new church, these historical precedents and the needs of the congregation must be synthesized in a building, but the end result will be an obviously subjective character formulated by the architect. In compliance with the above, we present two symbol systems in our dissertation:

Connection

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The church is the holy place where man approaches heaven, heaven descends to the earth. This is experienced by those who step through the entrance staircase, experiencing the ascent - into the central space and the vault symbolizing the sky is revealed. This is the main moment of the building, which resonates throughout the entire body of the church. Therefore, its design will not be more complex, since its purpose is to display a higher presence and its simplicity, which is the opposite of the complexity and contradictions of earthly existence. The meeting of the imperfection of earthly existence and the perfection of the divine plane is also indicated by the meeting of the disordered outer mantle wall that jumps in and out and the regular spherical dome.

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Eastern religiosity in our country

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Eastern religiosity has been present in our country since the beginning. A splendid proof of this is the Holy Crown itself, which has two clearly distinguishable parts - the representation of Eastern and Western religiosity in an object symbolizing a nation: the lower part is the Greek crown displaying icons - which refers to the carrying of Eastern religiosity, and the upper part is the Latin crown, which represents Catholicism.

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Nowadays, Eastern Greek religion itself is a symbol of connection, since in this religious trend the Eastern rite and the Western religious tradition meet with the help of their active and developing communities.