On Mount Tabor, not far from Nazareth, a miracle happened: Jesus, the same person as you and I, began to emit a blinding light, thereby manifesting his Divine essence. This plot recorded in the Gospels is known as the Transfiguration of the Lord and has been repeated in millions of frescoes and icons throughout the Christian world
And only in the Bulgarian village of Dobarsko, on the wall of the church of Saints Fyodor Tiron and Fyodor Stratilat, the transformed Jesus is shown against the background of a bright red rocket.
In another "Transfiguration" - a fresco from the Boyana Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in the southern suburb of Sofia - Christ is depicted in a silver oval with double contours. The similarity of the oval with a UFO is enhanced by eight straight lines, pointed at the ends of the rays, beating in all directions. Moreover, one of the rays so powerfully strikes Saint James that he fell, covering his eyes with his hands. We know from the texts of the Gospels that the witnesses of the scene of the Transfiguration were struck by the blinding radiance emanating from Jesus.
The “Transfiguration” in the village of Dobarsko was written in 1614, but documentary sources claim that the first church was erected on this site in the 11th century. Boyansky "UFO" was written by the master Vasily in the middle of the XIII century.
Did the Bulgarian artists really know something about Jesus that has not come down to us in the canonical Gospel texts and many other church images?
Rocket or disc?
Professor of history Bozhidar DIMITROV, who worked as director of the National Historical Museum of Bulgaria for many years, and since last year took the post of Minister of Diaspora in the Bulgarian government, shared his opinion on the cosmic interpretation of the Transfiguration scene with AiF:
- If on the fresco in the village of Dobarsko we see a classic rocket, then in the Boyana Church an oval-shaped UFO is depicted, which eyewitnesses who have met such devices often tell about. Frankly, this is a strange discrepancy: if Jesus flew to Earth from space, and after his teaching, arrest and crucifixion flew back, it is logical to assume that he used a more advanced type of aircraft than a classical rocket. And if medieval artists showed us Jesus the alien, why did they depict different "vehicles" in two cases? I have not yet found the answer to this question.
However, "Transfiguration" is not the only pictorial evidence of the cosmic version of the origin of Christ. In the same churches, frescoes depicting the Ascension have been preserved. In both cases, Jesus is placed in the correct realm supported by angels. What is it - a descent module or an individual vehicle in near-earth space?
Promotional video:
- The angels, supporting the sphere from both sides, somehow unnaturally arched their backs. These ridiculous poses of angels cannot be explained by anything, - Detelina MLADENOVA, an art critic working in the Boyana Church, drew my attention to an interesting detail.
Yes, in terms of iconography, there is nothing to explain. But, according to Professor Dimitrov, these strange curves were exactly what the artist needed in order to emphasize the corporeality, the volumetric materiality of the ball, which contains the figure of Christ. Especially so that the viewer does not think: the sphere is a kind of convention. No, not a convention at all! Especially considering that all the other frescoes in the same Boyana Church are extremely realistic.
- Our church, - said Detelina, not without pride, - is a UNESCO protected monument and one of the most visited in Bulgaria. Master Vasily anticipated the achievements of Giotto, the Italian artist of the Early Renaissance, for the first time in European art, who applied the laws of perspective and three-dimensional representation of bodies by eight years.
UFO air battles
Why are such strange frescoes (and there are two more similar ones in the church of the village of Dobarsko - "Descent into Hell", where Jesus is placed in a red oval, and "Dormition of the Virgin", where he descended in a rhombic apparatus) are found only in Bulgaria?
“Well, first of all, not only in Bulgaria,” says Professor Bozhidar Dimitrov, “on the frescoes in the Cathedral of the Dechansky Monastery in Kosovo, saints fly in oval apparatus with nozzles and flames flying out of them. These frescoes were shown in his famous film "Memories of the Future" by the researcher of the advanced civilization of antiquity Eric von Deniken. In the first centuries of the spread of Christianity, the Bulgarians settled the entire territory from the Volga to the Danube, including Serbia. By the way, our fellow tribesmen, who lived in the Volga Bulgaria, so often witnessed the arrival of foreign vehicles that they treated them as something familiar. The Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan, who visited the Volga Bulgaria in the 10th century, wrote about this with amazement. In front of his eyes, an air battle between two disc-shaped vehicles took place. The enlightened Arab was surprised not only by the very fact of this incident, but also by the way the Bulgars who watched it together with him indifferently explained that such scenes take place in their sky all the time.
EXPERT OPINION
Father Andrei Posternak, priest, dean of the history department of the Orthodox St. Tikhon University for the Humanities: - The oval that we see on the fresco "Transfiguration of the Lord" is the so-called mandorla - a mystical almond, personifying the radiance of glory, the holiness of the Divine light that shone on Mount Tabor … Its shape coincidentally coincided with the fantastic ideas about the alien aircraft. But this is nothing more than a coincidence. As in another fresco, the triangular outline of the red background around the figure of the Savior really resembles a conventional image of a rocket. But one should not mistake an accidental coincidence of a form for a different, non-canonical content. This would be an inappropriate stretch.