The Calendar of the Ostromir Gospel as Evidence of the History of the Slavonic Liturgical Books

Abstract

The specific features of the calendar of the Ostromir Gospel are discussed in this paper in comparison with the calendars of other Slavonic manuscripts, gospels and apostoli. The Ostromir Gospel contains a large number of rare commemorations that are typical of the Typikon of the Great Church Hagia Sofia. The paper provides a list of these commemorations together with data from the other Slavonic manuscripts in which they are included. The list shows that the largest number of these commemorations are found in several Bulgarian apostoli: the Enina Apostol, the Ohrid Apostol, Apostol No. 882 in the National Library in Sofia, Apostol and Gospel No. 508 in the National Library in Sofia, and in two Bulgarian menaia: the Draganov Menaion and the Menaion from the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg No. F.п.I.72. The paper also examines another specific feature of the Ostromir Gospel: the short hagiographic information it contains on some of the saints. These data are very similar to the notes in the Typikon of the Great Church. Hagiographic notes of this kind are also preserved in the calendars of several other Slavonic manuscripts, i.e., the same apostoli and menaia mentioned above. The paper also discusses the Western commemorations in the Ostromir Gospel, which are also found in the above-mentioned Bulgarian apostoli and menaia. All these data could be interpreted as evidence that the calendars of all these manuscripts have a common source, an archetype that contained a translation of the calendar of the Typikon of the Great Church Hagia Sophia. I argue that this archetype was the first calendar translated by the Holy Brothers Cyril and Methodius, and that it was embedded in the book of Acts and Epistles that they most likely translated themselves, or in a book which contained both the Acts and Epistles and the Gospels. The calendar of that book most likely was supplemented with Western commemorations during the mission in Great Moravia. This larger book was brought to Bulgaria by the disciples of the Holy Brothers and was later divided into an Apostolus and a Gospel.