While small, the Church of the Holy Mother of God is notable for its unusual architectural style, in particular for its high narthex flanked by two sharp-pointed towers. These features, which hint at Hungarian or Transylvanian influences, are highly atypical for medieval Bulgarian church architecture. The church is richly decorated on the inside, with as many as eleven frescoes of historical figures. One of these portraits, captioned as a despot, is variously identified as an eponymous son of Bulgarian tsarMichael Shishman or as an undocumented son of co-tsar Michael Asen IV; earlier speculation that the image depicted Serbian noble Mihailo Anđelović or Michael Shishman himself have since fallen out of favor with art historians. In addition to these early portraits, the interior walls of the church were painted with canonical murals, which can stylistically be assigned to the 14th–15th century. The church was reconstructed in 1958 and has been under Serbian state protection since 1982. (Full article...)
... that Džuvljarke written by Vera Kurtić includes interviews with members of the LGBT community in Serbia and concludes that Romani lesbian women are often "invisible"?
... that Serbian landowner Marija Trandafil spent a single day hungry, but she remembered the experience and became a major philanthropist in Novi Sad?
Tomić belonged to the first class of six Serbian pilots trained in France in 1912. In August 1914, he participated in the first aerial dogfight of the war, when he exchanged gunfire with an Austro-Hungarian plane over western Serbia. In the winter of 1915, during the Serbian Army's retreat across Albania to the Greek island of Corfu, he evacuated General Petar Bojović from Scutari by plane, delivered mail by air and transported the Serbian Government's gold and hard currency reserves from Niš to keep them from falling into enemy hands. Following the occupation of Serbia by the Central Powers, Tomić went to France and flew over the Western Front, where he had one confirmed kill. He returned to the Balkans in late 1916, conducted combat missions over Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia and shot down one enemy plane. (Full article...)
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