Images preserve what fire destroys

By LINDA HERRICK

Digital images created in a project by Auckland University's architecture school are now the only remains of a World Heritage Site Byzantine monastery in Greece which has been largely destroyed by fire.

The 800-year-old Hilandar Monastery on the island of the Holy Mount of Athos, in the north of Greece, lost close to half of its huge complex when fire broke out last Thursday night, burning down 300 rooms and leaving only the heaviest masonry walls.

Hilandar - kept isolated by stringent travel regulations - has been a research site for 200 years because of its beautiful architecture and rich collections of paintings, sculpture, embroidery, ceramics, documents, libraries and music manuscripts.

While screeds of books and articles have been written about Hilandar, Auckland University's school of architecture has developed a significant research and teaching association with the monastery, which is strictly off-limits to tourists - and women. The school's study tour to the site in 2001 led to a unique interactive digital model of the monastery, based on photographer Brian Donovan's rotating 360-degree Apple QuickTime VR (virtual reality) panoramas. Athos forbids the use of moving image technology on the island, so no movie or video images of the region exist anywhere in the world.

Last September the project leader, Auckland University architecture lecturer Michael Milojevic, and Donovan returned to Athos to take more cylindrical and spherical images to contribute to the Hilandar Panoramas project, which has toured Wellington and Auckland, and Calgary and Toronto in Canada.

It will travel to a gallery in Beograd in June.

The 360-degree images have been developed into interactive CD-Roms which, in a collaborative partnership with the University of Belgrade school of architecture, are being made into an interactive digital model of the monastery which will be premiered at the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of Serbia, also in June.

Milojevic said he heard of the fire when his Belgrade collaborator and the monastery's conservation architect Professor Emeritus Mirko Kovacevic called him on Friday morning. "Apparently the fire is thought to have started in the bakery and there were only 26 monks and five guests to fight the fire which got out of control by the middle of the night."

He said that Professor Kovacevic had noted over the phone that the Hilandar Panoramas created by Auckland University "now stands as an amazing document of a past era".

Hilandar Panoramas touring program