Byzantine traditions

The great Mediterranean country, Byzantium, which came to replace Ancient Rome and ancient culture, created a new Christian art and for almost 1000 years (6th–15th centuries AD) animated and fed the art of all Christian countries at the same time admitting new national versions of iconography, architecture, arts and crafts. For many centuries the Belarusian lands were directly connected with Byzantium, primarily through the Orthodox Church.

Archaeologists discovered objects of arts and crafts of the 12th–16th centuries made of stone, silver, gold, iron in the Byzantine tradition. This tradition is reflected in the Cross of Saint Euphrosyne of Polack.

The Orthodox icon is the most common and stable form of the embodied Byzantine tradition. The most ancient monuments representing this tradition are the murals in the Transfiguration (Saint Euphrosyne’s Church (c. 1161) in Polack. Later the Belarusian Orthodox icon was adapting iconographic images and academic painterly style of Western Europe. Belarusian artists were able to keep the balance between the two, while allowing the Byzantine style to be the leading one.