Edition of the Zograf Glagolitic Gospel

Editors: Ana Ivanova, Victoria Ilieva, Georgi Atanasov, Denica Gagarova, Iva Bakarova, Lora Lazarova, Magdalena Kostova, Maya Tarnovaliyska, Petrisia Velinova, Rositsa Stamenova, Stefan Mitev, Tsvetelina Aleksova-Georgieva, Andrej Bojadžiev

Introduction

One of the objectives of the Zograf Electronic Research Library is to compile information on manuscripts and archives that formerly belonged to the Zograf Monastery but are now housed in other repositories. This includes descriptions and editions of these historical documents.

One of these monuments is the 10th-century Zograf Glagolitic Four Gospels—one of the classic Old Bulgarian manuscripts. This Gospel is among the most important sources for reconstructing the Old Bulgarian language and for the earliest Slavic translation of the Gospel. The manuscript is first mentioned in notes attached to a Greek old-print book from 1671. These notes state that the manuscript was donated on April 25, 1786, to the Zograf Monastery of St. Nicholas in Provlakos (Πρόβλακος) near Yerissos. (Илиев 2019). In the 1840s, Neofit Bozveli, A. Mihanović (the Austrian consul in Constantinople), and V. I. Grigorovič were aware of the monument’s existence; in 1844, Grigorovič attempted, through Neofit Bozveli, to obtain the manuscript and take it with him (Григорович 1877: 67–70; Срезневский 1856). In 1860, the monastic community presented the monument to P. I. Sevastyanov as a gift to Russian Emperor Alexander II (1855–1881). The Gospel was subsequently transferred to the Imperial Public Library in St. Petersburg (now the Russian National Library), where it remains to this day under the call number Глаг. 1.

The manuscript contains the text from Matthew 3:11 to John 21. The beginning and some leaves of the manuscript are missing. The manuscript now consists of II+304 leaves. The ancient portion comprises 272 leaves (leaves 2–40, 58–288), with the following sections missing: Matthew 1–3:10, 9:12–21, Mark 3:30–4:11, 16:14–20, Luke 4:5–27, 13:28–14:2, 24:30–44, John 3:12–35, 17:12–24, 20:3–27 are missing. A section (from chapter 16:19 to 24:20) was lost from the text of the Gospel of Matthew as early as the late 11th or early 12th century. This text was added around the beginning of the 12th century in Glagolitic script (pp. 41–57). The scribe used the parchment of another, older Glagolitic Gospel. The inserted quaternion is a palimpsest—under the newer Glagolitic text, individual Glagolitic letters from an older four-Gospel text are visible, which had been erased to write the missing text. It contains Matt 16:19–17:5 and 17:23–24:20, i.e., the inserted section also has a missing leaf. Thus, today the Zograf Gospel consists of three Glagolitic texts. One of these texts is the main one (272 folios), the other text (16 folios) is found in the inserted quire, and the third Glagolitic text is found in the palimpsest of the inserted quire (6 out of 30 palimpsestic pages have been deciphered, though not entirely), 6 of 30 palimpsestic pages), with the deciphered passages being part of the Four Gospels—Matt 18–24. A Synaxarion and a Menologion in Cyrillic were added at the end of the manuscript during the 13th–14th centuries (pp. 289–304).

Библиография

Much has been written about the Zograf Gospel. As a classic Old Bulgarian monument, information about it can be found in every Old Bulgarian language textbook, as well as in the introductory sections of courses on medieval Bulgarian and Slavic literature and culture. Here we will mention only a few of them.

The edition

These pages are based on the first complete edition by Vatroslav Jagić (Jagić 1879). The additions and corrections to this edition by N. K. Grunskij (Грунский 1907) and L.Moszyński (Moszyński 1961)have been taken into account. Subsequent electronic versions of the text reflect these changes. The monument first appeared online in electronic form (ASCII code) as part of the initiative Corpus Cyrillo-Methodianum Helsingiense (1986 – 2017) by Prof. Jouko Lindstedt of the University of Helsinki (Codex Zographensis). Subsequent online publications are based on this presentation, now in Unicode format where the text is presented separately in Glagolitic and Cyrillic, organized by chapters and verses: TITUS, Викитека.

The idea for this new online publication arose after the digital copies of the monument were presented on the pages of Russian National Library. In addition to the photographs of the manuscript, their project also includes a general introduction to the artifact, a description, a table of contents, a bibliography, and a search function. The Cyrillic Church Slavonic version of the Gospel is included with the photographs.

Our edition is of the diplomatic type. It presents the manuscript texts in two columns—in Glagolitic and Cyrillic—with a link to the digital images from the Russian National Library in the middle. The text reflects all the features of the original, and page, line, and verse numbers have been added. In the first phase, only the main text of the manuscript is presented. The plan is to gradually publish all later additions and notes to the text, as well as the later-added supplementary pages, the palimpsestic sections, the synaxarion, and the calendar.

This project is being carried out by students enrolled in the course “Glagolitic Script in the Balkans until the 13th Century” at the Faculty of Slavic Philology of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski.”

Table of Contents

Gospel of Matthew

Gospel of Mark

Gospel of Luke

Gospel of John