Margarita Kuyumdzhieva

In academic circles, Prof. Dr. Habil. Elka Bakalova, Corresponding Member of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, is widely known as an art historian and cultural anthropologist, long-time academic lecturer and expert in the field of preservation of cultural monuments. Her 85th birthday, celebrated at the end of 2023, is a good occasion to show her once again the deep respect that her rich scientific and public activity deserves at all times and without special pretext. In today’s Bulgaria, charismatic great academic intellectuals are so rare that we can only be happy and grateful as long as they are among us, because they are bearers of already disappearing moral values and scholarly talents and skills, being the last of the Mohicans of the humanities.

The present text is an attempt to understand and to come closer to that which has been passed down through the centuries as the perception of God as the Holy Trinity, which has found its visual expression in art that in the Orthodox tradition has been transformed into an indivisible part of theology. To this end, one of the variants for the visualization of the idea of the Holy Trinity is chosen that exists both in Eastern Orthodox and Western art with close formal characteristics, but in different contexts: the image of the Trinity of the Synthronoi type.What are the origins of this image, what is its meaning, what were the mechanisms for its spread and what are its basic models - these are the questions that the present text raises, without pretending to be able to answer them definitively.