The article analyzes the use of verbal periphrases, as well as other multi-word nominations with the verbs творити and сътворити in the oldest Slavonic translations of the 9th–10th centuries. The verbal periphrasis is considered one of the types of phraseological collocations. A multi-word name that paraphrases a verb nominates only one linguistic concept. In verbal periphrases, verbs act as desemantized (i.e., as losing their own semantics), and the semantic content of the nomination moves to obligatory informative words. Previous studies show that models of verbal periphrases existed in the folk Slavic speech of the time. The author believes that these models influenced the creation of neologisms. Bookmen created a lot of neologisms for nominating concepts that were unfamiliar or barely known to the Slavs before the time of translations, as well as concepts due to the difference between the Greek language picture of the world and the Slavic one. The calquing of Greek verbs-composites and phrases with verbs “fell” on the original Slavic models of verbal periphrases. In the calquing of Greek verbs-composites, several examples of the use of the verbs творити and сътворити to convey verbal components with different semantics indicate the desemantization of the verbs творити and сътворити. Also, in the phraseological calquing of Greek phrases with verbs, several examples of the use of the verbs творити and сътворити to convey verbs with different semantics indicate the desemanization of the verbs творити and сътворити.

The Slavic variant of Simeon’s Miscellany, known as the Izbornik of 1073, has preserved to a great extent the language of Simeon’s prototype, which has not survived, and contains information not only about the Old Russian, but also about the Old Bulgarian literary language. The edition with the Greek sources of Simeon’s Miscellany provides an opportunity for deriving new information on the subject. The current article studies some language peculiarities (grammatical and lexical) from the text of Svetoslav’s Copy of 1073, which are missing or are poorly represented in the texts of the classical corpus of Old Bulgarian manuscripts, namely, the participle бышѧ, бышѧшти, meaning ‘which would have happened’, the substitution of relative pronouns and adverbs of anaphorical type (such as иже, еже) by relative pronouns of the interrogative *kw-types, and their further extension by adding the particles -то and -се, as well as demonstrative pronouns in post-position in anaphoric use and grammaticalization of the article morpheme (mostly tъ and less often sь). Special attention is paid to certain rare and specific lexemes as well as word-derivational chains.

The first Slavonic translation of the Life of St. Andrew the Fool was produced within the Greek-Byzantine cultural environment around the year 950. Thirteen excerpts of this translation were incorporated into the didactic section of the Extended edition of the Prologue, which was compiled during the 1160s. An analysis of over 100 copies of the Prologue has revealed that traditional borrowings from the Life of St. Andrew the Fool were transposed to other calendar dates, the original articles of the first Old Russian translation were revised, and additional materials from other translations were integrated into the Prologue. For instance, the Moscow edition of the Verse Prologue was enriched with five new narratives from the Life of St. Andrew the Fool, while the Kirillo-Belozersky edition included six new articles. Comparative analysis suggests that in augmenting the Verse Prologue with these materials, scribes utilized the South Slavonic translation of the Life of St. Andrew the Fool, which originated in the Balkans no later than the 14th century.

The issue of multiple translations is a widely recognized and extensively studied phenomenon in Slavic studies. This article delves into the peculiar scenario of both double and ‘repeated’ translation, conducted not directly from the original, but via an intermediary translation (Zwischenübersetzung). Specifically, it examines two Church Slavonic translations made from Latin in Novgorod at the end of the 15th century and in the first half of the 16th century. These texts represent prayers from the Gospel of Luke, which, within the Greek and Latin traditions, constituted part of the biblical canticles appended to the psalter. The existence of Church Slavonic versions of texts previously translated from Greek necessitates caution when evaluating these ‘new’ translations, as they reveal intriguing variant readings and instances of contamination, both lexically and, to a lesser extent, grammatically. In addition to a brief analysis of these fascinating philological and linguistic phenomena, this work presents, for the first time, an interlinear edition of both Novgorodian texts, followed by a separate edition of the commentated Psalter.

The article contains an edition of the appeal for support from the monastery of St Theodore Tiron and St Theodore Stratilates near Perushtitsa addressed to the Russian Tsar Aleksey Mihaylovich at the end of 1647. A hypothesis is proposed that the letter was composed by the famous copyist and calligrapher Vasiliy of Sofia, who usually worked together with a close relative or student of him called Stefan. Based on unpublished Russian documents, the journey of the abbot of the Perushtitsa Monastery, Hieromonk Isaiah, to Moscow is described. On February 4, 1648, he and his two companions were received by the Metropolitan of Kiev, Silvestr Kossov, who gave them a letter of recommendation to all Orthodox Christians. By the end of February, they arrived at the Russian border in Putivl’, and on March 13, they departed for the Russian capital together with Bishop Cyprian of Campania. They arrived in Moscow on March 28 and were immediately received in the Kremlin, where they presented their petitions and documents and received gifts and money. On April 22, the tsar solemnly received the delegations led by Bishop Cyprian and Abbot Isaiah in the Golden Throne Chamber in the Kremlin. At the end of April, the envoys from the Perushtitsa Monastery visited the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, and on May 8, 1648, they received donations and permission to leave Moscow and to return back to their country.

The Old Church Slavonic Life of S. Constantine-Cyril (VC) tells about the various diplomatic missions Constantine-Cyril had been engaged in. His second diplomatic task let him participate in a mission to the Muslim Arabs in order to carry out a theological dispute. Because all extant manuscripts of VC display an erroneous dating of Constantine-Cyril’s mission to the Arabs, VC’s report about it had long been questioned in regard to historical authenticity. However, there had also been scholars who, on the contrary, took the text in VC as a fairly literal account of the disputation as it actually occurred. Our paper will contribute to this latter theses by arguing that the content of some arguments can only be understood on the pre-condition that the interlocutors refer to the allegorical language of the Shepherd of Hermas. The fact, that the text in VC needs the reconstruction of a context to be understood properly, firstly, contributes to the notion, that the record is composed by using transcripts of an actual disputation. Secondly, it is remarkable to see, that the Shepherd of Hermas, although excluded from the canonical Biblical texts since the 4th c., had been read in the Eastern parts of the Byzantine empire as along as in the 9th century.

During the terrain research in the Greek-Catholic (Rusnák) environment of Vojvodina in 2007, we managed to find a Cyrillic manuscript collection in the parish in Ďurđevo (Ђурђево, Serbia), which we called the Krstur manuscript and which was written in 1893–1901 (its compiler was Ján Moskaľ from Kocura). It contains a number of texts based on Church Slavonic and the Vojvodina variant of the East Slovak dialect as the literary language of the Vojvodinian Rusyns. The texts in this collection are inspired by the Bible and are mainly of an educational and didactic character. They were written in an understandable language, therefore they provide the simple believer with a space not only for understanding but also for interpreting and updating the diverse religious stories and plots. The paper illuminates the didactic significance of the biblical topics in the development of the literary and linguistic tradition of the Greek Catholics in Vojvodina in the period of their development to the codification of their literary language.

This study raises the question of the Bulgarian national narrative about the origins of the Slavic alphabet(s) from the perspective of the local cultural memory and history of humanities within the conceptual frameworks by Hayden White and Marc Augé. It provides a comparison with other competing narratives on the subject: the official standpoint of the Republic of Northern Macedonian and the alternative historical representations that function in Bulgarian culture nowadays. The semantic and ideological shifts in understanding and presenting the (his)story are commented on in the context of the intellectual practices of the socialist period, as the main thesis is that at the core of all of the mutually excluding views on the historical past, there is a fundamental tension between the two notions the Slavic and the Bulgarian. It is also suggested, that recently, the radical reorganization of this relationship has occurred, and as such – it generated some basic reformulations of the historical narrative, which shows signs of dismantling the regime of truth. The latter is recognized as the primal condition of the contemporary war for letters.

At key points of the narrative of the books of Samuel and Kings there are larger passages of women’s speech marked by a high degree of rhetorical skill and eloquence. The Old Church Slavonic (Old Bulgarian) translation of these biblical books is characterized by many archaic features, therefore the article aims at exploring the metaphrastic choices of the early Slavonic scribes when translating the speech of women. The examples, drawn from the chronographic redaction of the texts as registered in the Jewish Chronograph, are discussed within the framework of different speech situations. Focusing on the words of Hannah, Abigail, Michal, Tamar, Jezebel and Bathsheba, the study identifies several simple women’s speech markers and traces them out in the Slavonic translation. At some points the specific translation choices have contributed to a subtler depiction of the characters and there are several examples where the translation creates new meaning and adds to the rhetorical power of their words.