Paintings in the Tower Church of the Siuren Fortress: New Materials

Introduction. The defensive line of the Siuren fortress (mountainous southwestern Crimea) consists of two curtain walls and a round tower between them. In the 13th – 15th centuries, a church was built on the second floor of the tower, the walls and dome of which were completely covered with fresco paintings. Methods. In the 19th and early 21st centuries, the Siuren fortress was studied by Peter Keppen, Aleksey Uvarov, Gregory Karaulov, Dmitry Strukov, Evgeniy Veymarn, Nikolay Repnikov, Oleg Dombrovsky, and the authors of this publication. Analysis. The murals of the Tower church of the Siuren fortress were lost in the early 21st century. It can only be reconstructed using the available fragmentary descriptions and images that had been made in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. The archives of the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences contain an unpublished report by Dmitry Strukov. He visited Siuren’ fortress and made the description of the murals that survived at that time. Four unknown watercolors by the artist are also presented: plans, sections of the Tower church, and fragments of the murals. Results. The watercolor drawings of murals allow us to clarify the attribution and to get an idea of the color scheme of the murals. The plans and sections made by Dmitry Strukov allow us to correlate architecture and fragments of paintings in the interior of the Tower church. Funding. The study was conducted by Yu.M. Mogarichev as part of the State Task assigned to Sevastopol State University: “Formation and functioning of settlement structures and population of Crimea from the Middle Ages to the modern period based on the archeological sources and interdisciplinary studies (FEFM-2024-0014)”.