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Virtuality and documentation: Recreating the Byzantine heritage D. Gemenetzis, H. Georgiadis, P. Patias The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Department of Cadastre, Photogrammetry & Cartography Univ. Box 473, GR-54006 Thessaloniki, Greece E-mail: patias@topo.auth.gr Abstract Often times the full documentation of a historical site requires excessive surveying and photogrammetric work, while numerous objects of both large and very small volume should be recorded. Moreover, the complexity of the objects, their usually large number and their spatial, topological or historical interrelation, calls for application of advanced GIS techniques for their documentation. To a growing extent, users ask for and photogrammetrists must produce virtual 3D representations of objects of architectural and archaeological interest. Until recently such results could only be generated at high cost and with highly specialized photogrammetric equipment; consequently, routine work in this field did not seem practicable. Today, digital techniques not only pave the way for new products but also allow photogrammetric practice, when applied to the documentation of architectural and archaeological objects in particular, to employ modest means to ends of high quality. These questions of documentation and development of virtual representations are addressed in the present contribution, which has been motivated by the impressive number of tasks falling into this category and, more specifically, by the documentation of the 14th -century Monastery of St. Dionysios, Mt. Athos and the early post-byzantine frescoes of its church. Finally, the approaches are illustrated with examples of a 3D virtual representation of the church, an animated walk-through and a much needed automatic indexing of the numerous frescoes using GIS and multimedia means. Location - History of the monument The monastery of St. Dionysios, is located in the northwestern side of the peninsula of Mt. Athos. It can be only approached by the sea, from where the visitor has to follow an uphill 500m-long stone-road. The monastery is built on a steep cliff 80 m above the sea. The climate in this area is rather mild and is characterized by abrupt changes from sunny days to wild winds and heavy rain.
The monastery was established in the second half of the 14th century by Saint Dionisios, who was a monk at that time at the monastry of Philopheou, Mt. Athos. In 1375, the byzantine Emperor Alexios the 3rd of the Komninos family (Fig. 5) issued the official decree for the establishment of the monastery, which is sealed by the emperial golden stamp. This official document among other emperial documents (Fig. 4) of the 14th century are kept in the monastery.
The buildings of the monastery were built in different time periods, and due to the high seismicity of the area many of them have been repeatedly renovated.
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