Moravia Magna [antikvár]

MORAVIA MAGNA The Great Moravian Empire The culture of the Great Moravian Empire, its artistic expression, architecture preserved only in ground-plan foundations, wall paintings existing in fragments, but nevertheless unknown, but above all artistic handicrafts, remarkable for their matureness and technical perfection, were not the product of an exceptional interplay of chance historical events, but a synthesis of three centuries of creative activity, contacts and experience of our ancestors on the banks of the Danube and the Morava from the Elbe to the Tisza. The main task of this book is to trace the basic tendencies of this complicated process and to present at least a more or less integrated picture of the culture developed in Great Moravia. • Our ancestors were brought into contact with ancient Greco-Roman civilization not only through the remains of military camps and the pillaged ruins of Roman towns in Pannónia and Noricum, but also through the newly revived Byzantine Empire, the Adriatic coast and north Italy. Contacts with Germanic and nomad tribes, on the other hand, determined the narrower political and cultural framework of the earliest years of their history. Today it is generally recognized that the primordial culture of the Slav tribes in our territory was by no means so poor as would seem from the findings from the cremation graves or the remains of the semi-subterranean houses. Strict rites and unfavourable soil conditions in both cases considerably limited the range of the findings preserved. And moreover the culture of the class society in the process of being formed was not so simple and homogeneous as was thought until recently. It is for this reason that the author does not hesitate to include in the relics of Slav material culture even findings so ethnically