Gold Edition

Facsimile of the Miroslav gospel

Since 1998, the team that produced the facsimile edition in Johannesburg has been conducting print tests and comparing the printings with the previous edition. We tried to solve the problem of faithful reproduction the paintings of the ancient Serbian illuminators on a gold background, which was not possible with the offset printing technology of that time. The best facsimile publishers in the world use a colour tone on the gold foil, and for our dream print, we had to use full colour.

At the beginning of 2016, we decided to test all new technologies. We hoped that their tumultuous development would lead to the solution of our problem.

Our goal was to create the best phototype edition in the world, without any compromises.

Teams of experts from the world’s leading press manufacturers (Heidelberg, Rolland, MGI, Scodix and others) gladly accepted the challenge. Test prints came from all over the world: USA, Japan, South Korea, China, India, Israel, Greece, Serbia, Austria, Italy, Germany and France. Several times it seemed that we had solved the problem, but soon we were confronted with reality – either the printing machine could not transfer the gold dust to the paper, or it was not possible to position the print precisely over the gold foil, or the ink was flaking off the gold.

After 200 attempts, we assumed that a special Heidelberg printing press could solve our problem. We asked our friend from Vienna, Petar Milatović Ostroški, to organise a test in one of the three printing houses in Europe that own such a machine. In April 2018, equipped with the experience of colour printing on gold foil, we made the first test runs. Finally, with God’s help, everything was in place. Over the next ten months, Aleksandar Popović improved prepress from Johannesburg by separately editing the colour of the parchment on each sheet, dark letters, red letters, initials, gold, illuminations and ancient dirt over gold, and adapted everything to a specific printing machine.

In March 2019, the Gold Edition of the Miroslav Gospel was printed. The result is in front of you.