Kera Tamara and Murad I - love story? : what do the buildings in the folk songs say?

In 1373, the Bulgarian princess Kera Tamara married the Ottoman sultan Murad I. From historians' perspective, this was merely a political act that postponed the Ottoman invasion and the fall of the Bulgarian state under Ottoman rule. This thesis tries to prove a love relation rather than only a politically motivated marriage by examining a particular object through the method of architectural analysis and, in this way, explores the possibility of finding a factual relationship between love and architecture. This is the first scientific attempt to ascertain a love between Tamara and Murad and her privileged status within the Ottoman court. On the one hand, a positive outcome would be essential because it would encourage a search for Tamara's influence on events and political decisions taken in the Ottoman court during her time. Such a discovery would significantly change the Bulgarian historical narrative. On the other hand, this would verify an objective relation between love and architecture. In its first part, the thesis presents the research in the stage where it is focused on examining what is assumed as Tamara's grave, trying, through an architectural analysis, to determine the buried person's identity, status, and Murad's attitude toward them. In the second part, the thesis describes the subsequent stage of the research, when in search of more clues about Tamara's grave, a significant volume of Bulgarian folk songs was studied. During this stage, the research led to the development of a method for dating folk songs through the analysis of the architectural objects mentioned in them. The determination of the songs' occurrence, in turn, proved another kind of love, status, and influence of Tamara: the love of the people for her, her privileged position in popular memory, and the social influence of her figure. In its conclusion, the thesis states that the matter of the question of the factual connections between love and architecture cannot be answered by the chosen approach and the analysis of the specific object, and it needs a large-scale and interdisciplinary exploration. Yet, research made a significant contribution by developing a method of song dating that, combined with other methods, can enhance their results.