Tsaritsa Jelena of Serbia as an Independent Patron of Arts between 1355 and 1366

This essay discusses the acts of patronage by Jelena (Jelisaveta), Tsaritsa of Serbia, undertaken after the death of her husband, Tsar Stefan Dušan. It investigates how they contributed to the reconciliation of the Serbian and Byzantine churches and to the establishment of Jelena’s image as an independent governor. By using the politics of memory, the Tsaritsa attempted to represent her deceased husband as a pious ruler, in order to ground her own power and that of her son on the shared Serbian-Byzantine memory of patronage. When establishing the cult of Patriarch Kallistos in the Serbian milieu, Jelena shifted the emphasis from ecclesiastic conflict to political negotiations.