Още за ранните новобългарски народни четива: ръкопис № 193 от сбирката на Хилендарския манастир
A Contribution to the Study of Bulgarian Early Modern Popular Literature: Manuscript 193 of the Collection of the Athonite Hilandar Monastery

Summary/Abstract: The article describes the content of the Hilandar manuscript 193, written in the vernacular, and places it in the context of Bulgarian damaskins. The author argues that it is counterproductive to insist on the narrow definition of ‘damaskin’, which denies the right of such manuscripts to be treated together with prototypical damaskins. The manuscript contains one of the three known complete handwritten copies of a miscellany with a focus on spiritually beneficial tales and apocrypha, most of which also circulated prior to their inclusion into the set of five texts that was copied together. The comparison of the most recent of the stories – that about the secret servant of God St. Euphrosynus the Cook – with the older Church Slavonic and Greek textual traditions, makes it possible to capture the specificity of the Early Modern Bulgarian version. In contrast with the older tradition, in which Euphrosynus figures as a despised simpleton, the Early Modern Bulgarian version shows him as a literate man respected from the outset by his brethren. The author suggests that the new image of the saint is in line with the tremendous value attached to literacy and education in the intellectual circles to which the compiler belonged. It is in those circles that the cult of the Slavic Apostles St. St. Cyril and Methodius would eventually be reintroduced among Bulgarians as their national symbol. The distribution of the frescoes, representing Euphrosynus in the Orthodox cultural space, overlaps with that of the miscellanies under discussion only in Mount Athos, which leads the author to believe that the prototype of those miscellanies must have come into being there.

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