Ornaments of vegetal inspiration in orthodox architecture

Abstract

The Church is the only architectural program able to illustrate the cohesion between matter and spirit. Faith acts as a binder of the relationship between religious experiences, aesthetic emotions and rational solutions. The structure materializes the sacred, while the accompanying associated arts assigns aesthetic and spiritual meanings. Worship spaces consist on the basis of rigorous canons which are founded on symbolic meanings. Regarding these religious ideologies, the vision of these spaces is probative for revealing their concept of life, world and divinity. The symbol, a link between visible and imaginary, between concrete and intuitive, expresses clearly the relation between divine and world. It and represents an indicator to what is beyond it, but remains always linked in the present reality. This paper aims recognizing and interpreting the symbolic elements of vegetable inspiration used in the Orthodox worship spaces, metaphorical images of archetypal space.