Mariyana Tsibranska-Kostova

Ivan Petrov. Od inkunabułów do pierwszych gramatyk. Konteksty rozwoju bułgarskiego języka literackiego koniec XV – początek XVII wieka. Łódź: Wydawnictwo uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2015, 268 pp. ISBN 978-83-7969-792-2

The goal of this article is to analyze an early 16th - century Slavonic copy of the Legend of how the Bulgarian Zographou Monastery on Mount Athos was founded. This text represents an integral part of the sacred history of the Holy Mountain, known under the title Πάτρια (Patria Athonensia). In the beginning of the 16th century (1508), hieromonk Gabriel, at that time notary of the Protaton Church at Karyai, translated into Slavonic of Serbian recension a cycle of mutually connected texts on the foundation of Holy Mountain and some of its monasteries, which he found in the Greek written tradition of the Hagiorite Patria. The analysis in this paper is focused on the most archaic South Slavonic copy with Gabriel’s translation in miscellany № 733 from the middle of the 16th century, which makes part of Kovačević’s collection, held in the Serbian National Library in Belgrade. The Legend about the foundation of the Zographou Monastery is analyzed in the light of the concepts of “cultural memory”, “spiritual identity“, and “historical tradition”. The authors express a deep gratitude to their Serbian colleagues Vlada Stanković and Tatjana Subotin-Golubović for the given opportunity to use the digital copy of the manuscript, as well as to Dmitrij Bulanin, whose new research Афон в древнерусской письменности до конца XVI в. (Словарь книжников и книжности Древней Руси. Вып.2, части 1–2. М., 2012, 429–763), appeared at the same time as the deposition of the current article, represents a solid base for further investigations. 

The article studies the possible ethno-cultural content of one of the anathemas in the Synodicon of Boril from the 14th century, connected with the day of John the Baptist (Midsummer Day), in the context of the doctrinal and socio-historical aspects of the dual heresies of the Bulgarian Bogomils and the Catars from Langdoc, South France. Its main purpose is to comment, not to solve the complex problem of the interaction of the folklore culture and the ritual practices of the heretics, as it remains insufficiently documented by the written sources and suggests a great number of, often controversial or mutually incompatible, interpretations. By producing separate facts from studies on South French ethnographic material and emphasizing on the main semantic codes of the holiday in the collective memory of the European Middle Ages, the authoress supports the view of identity of the assessing paradigms towards the heresies and the paganism. An attempt has been made to parallel these – hypotheses more than conclusions – to a manuscript text material where it allows relevant perusals. The raised question is added to a number of others, which do not have a definite answer and which involve a more thorough examination on the paradoxes of the nomination on the topic The Bogomils about Themselves and the Others about Them.