The Printed Page and the Painted Column: An Architectural Microhistory of a Church in Ottoman Thessaly

In the 18th and 19th centuries, craftspeople in the Ottoman world encountered Western-style ornament through books printed in Vienna and Venice that circulated throughout the Balkans. Although not intended as pattern books, these prints often served as sources for iconographic and ornamental motifs for the painted decoration of buildings, leading to the dissemination of Western Baroque motifs even into remote and rural areas. This article relates this phenomenon to the church of Ayios Athanasios in Palamas, Thessaly (built 1810–1811), examining how a group of painters decorated its interior with motifs copied from liturgical books produced in Venice. The result was a regional artistic idiom that transcended the limits of modern scholarly designations such as “folk art” and “post-Byzantine.”