Macabre Goes East: A Peculiar Verse among Funerary Inscriptions of the Orthodox Christians in the Late Medieval Balkans

Abstract

This paper discusses the inclusion of the characteristic verses from the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead on funerary inscriptions of the Orthodox Christians in the Late Middle Ages. It also discusses reasons for the hostility toward the macabre images in the East, as well as the possibility of interpreting certain Byzantine depictions as the appropriate doubles for the western macabre imagery.