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Virtuality and documentation: Recreating the Byzantine heritage As it is typical in the monasteries of Mt. Athos, the main church (Katho-likon) is located at the center of the whole building complex. The main church was built during 1535-1547 and has 5 cuppolas which are covered by copper sheets. The dimensions of the church is 28mx 18m x 20m and its interior is fully covered by magnificent frescos made by the famous Cretian painter Zorzi (1st half of the 16th century). Worth mentioning is also the wooden temple of the church which was covered by gold in 1803, while parts of the earlier temple from 1553 are still recognized in some places. The whole monastery is a unique architectural monument as a whole. Besides, many of its structural components are monuments themselves. Worth mentioning are the three wooden crafted doors of the main church, the central one being covered by golden leaves (Fig, 6). The interior of the main church besides being decorated by frescoes (Fig. 7), it also contains the wooden temple (mentioned above) (Fig, 8) and a lot of other unique items, among them fascinating portable icons (Fig, 9).
The archives and the museum of the monastery contain a big amount of unique documents, like the above mentioned emperial orders (see Figs. 4, 5) and historical relics like a big collection of wooden crafted and metal crosses (Fig. 10).  Figure 11. Typical wooden and metal crosses from the monastery musuem The documentation project According to the Venice Convention: "....The restoration procedure is a very specialized procedure which must be done exceptionally. It's objective is to preserve and uncover the monument's aesthetic and historic values and is based on the respect to its starting standing and its authentic elements. It stops at the point from which guesses begin about the monument's original condition. Apart from this point every procedure considered needed to be carried out for technical or aesthetic reasons, must be distinguishable from the (starting) architectonic composition and must have today's sign on it. In all cases archeological studying must precede the procedure of the restoration which will follow......", also ".... The works of conserving, restoring and excavating must be based on reliable proofs, which are analytical reports enriched with fully detailed designs, plans and photos. All parts of works carried out dealing with "extraction" of recent parts of the "artwork", consolidation of the structure, restoration and the embodiment of new "elements" and all the technical and morphological elements found during these procedures, must be carefully written down. These proofs and facts must be open for every one to reach and study. Their publication is being suggested......". Therefore the photogrammetrist’s job in providing such reliable proofs and detailed documentation is quite important. When studying such a complex monument the involved work is quite tedious and should be done with extreme caution and respect to the monument. On the technical side, the documentation involves mapping of objects of quite different sizes, required degree of detail and accuracy. To make the picture more complete, we should mention restrictions in entering specific areas of the monastery (either due to masses taking place both in day and in night time, or for reasons of disturbance), lack of electric power in some areas, the restriction of moving outside the monastery anything at all, and the inconvenience of carrying into the Mt. Athos area large instrumentation (like surveying and photogrammetric instrumentation). Therefore the whole documentation process should be done with the minimum stay in the monastery, the minimum instrumentation, while at the same time should cover all the required scale, detail and accuracy requirements. In this paper we are going to briefly report only on a few phases of the documentation and the delivered products, namely :
Portable, light-weighted “Control-point devices” either from aluminum or from plexiglass (like the one’s shown in Fig 12) have been constructed and used instead of the usual surveying of the control points. The photography has been carried out with Rollei and Kodak DCS-460 cameras with artificial light. Digital Photogrammetric software, automatic matching and surface reconstruction, and the 3D-Builder software has been used. Accuracies at the range of 1mm-5mm have been obtained.  Figure 12. Portable, light-weighted “Control-point devices” from aluminium and plexiglass have been used  Figure 13. 3D recontsruction and visualization of the famous cross of Helen Palaiologos (15th cent.) 3D reconstruction of medium size objects Again, instead of using regular surveying, control information has been obtained through aluminum frames. Photography and processing has been done on site while detail photography served for documentation at larger scales.  Figure 14. 3D recontsruction and visualization of the curved gold-plated door of “Katho-likon” and documentation of detail. Only three such doors exist worldwide. |
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