Crypt of Saint Sava Church – Belgrade

So, if and when you go to Belgrade, make sure that you visit this monumental religious temple of the Christian Orthodox world.

ABOUT THE CRYPT

The crypt is very impressive. It consists of a burial church, treasures of the Serbian Orthodox Church and an exhibition area.

In the future, it will also be a burial place for Serbian patriarchs.

It was constructed in the Byzantine style, as an independent underground area with four entrances.

The crypt is wonderfully decorated. Images of apostles, martyrs and saints cover the ceiling and the space in-between is covered by gold leaves. Additionally, walls are covered with Serbian religious images and the entire area is dominated by gold colour patterns. The crypt is also richly decorated with relief art.

One part of the crypt is a church, dedicated to the Holy Prince Lazar. The altar of this burial church is directly below the altar of the Saint Sava church. The bronze doors on the left and on the right of the alter lead to the burial chambers.

In addition to religious ceremonies, they will use the crypt for various cultural events, such as exhibitions, gatherings and concerts. It has spectacular acoustic features.

WALL FRESCOES

To present the crypt, I took photos of wall and ceiling frescoes. The image below is on the wall directly opposite of the altar of the Saint Lazar Church. It’s also the biggest wall fresco.

Images depict people and events related to the Serbian history and also to the Orthodox religion.

Personally, I am not familiar with all images, although I would like to learn the exact story behind every one of them.

In this post, you can see almost all wall frescoes anti clockwise, as you enter the crypt. I couldn’t take photos of frescoes within the area closed to the public.

But, that’s OK. We don’t need to take photos of absolutely everything. Images in this post will give you a very good idea of the crypt.

They made sure to carefully select images as crypt decoration, thus each image sends a powerful message.

The wall frescoes were all painted directly on the walls, in the same technique as traditional fresco painting.

Certainly, these images resemble Serbian medieval frescoes that you can see in Serbian centuries old monasteries.

What’s particularly interesting is that some frescoes contain images of people dressed in Serbian traditional attire. This also gives us an idea of the way people used to dress in those times.

CEILING FRESCOES

Unlike the wall frescoes, the ceiling frescoes were first painted on canvas and then attached to the ceiling. But, you can’t notice this variation in the technique.

Clearly, the ceiling frescoes are various images from the Bible.

Perhaps, there isn’t much artistic value in these frescoes at the moment, although their decorative value is superb.

It is certainly not realistic to expect that, in this day and age, frescoes are done the same way they used to be done 500 years ago when Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel.

But maybe in 500 years from now people will visit this crypt and will look at these images in the same way we now look at medieval and Renaissance paintings and frescoes, while we admire their artistic value.

In any case, the crypt is very beautiful and, at the same time, it’s a very special place, especially for the faithful of the Orthodox religion.

If you go to Belgrade, make sure that you visit the Saint Sava church. You can now see both the church and its magnificent crypt.

The Russian Academy of Science decorated the church inside, together with the master iconographer Miloje Milinkovic. They created what’s now the biggest mosaic in the world.