Vladimir V. Sedov
Institute of Archaeology R AS, Moscow, Russia
E-mail: sedov1960@mail.ru

Keywords: Rus, architecture, church architecture, altar apses, rectangular apses, Romanesque architecture, Byzantine architecture, Byzantine influence.

The article is focused on a group of Rus architecture monuments erected in the 12th – early 13th century. Those temples belonging both to the cross-in-square type and the compact cross-inscribed type as well as the church type without aisles and transept are known in Polotsk, Smolensk and Novogrudok. The altar apses in them have rectangular shape. There is an assumption that such shape of altar apses was associated with the Romanesque sites of Poland. The author points to the newly uncovered Middle-Byzantine temple in Constantinople, which had the same rectangular altar apses, as well as a number of temples in the territory of modern Greece, which make it possible to assume that rectangular altar apses came to Rus from Byzantium architecture, first to Polotsk in the 12th century and later to Smolensk and Novogrudok at the turn of the 12th–13th centuries.

DOI: 10.31857/S086960630005669-4