Минейният комплект на Врачанския манастир от началото на XVII в.
An Early Seventeenth-Century Collection of Menaia from the Vratsa Monastery

Summary/Abstract: Years ago the Bulgarian scholar Bonyo Angelov, writing on the manuscripts of the scribe Jov Shishatovac, suggested that his two menaia of 1608, copied in the Holy Trinity Monastery near Vratsa, were part of a larger collection requested by the abbot Varlaam. Another menaion from the collection was copied in 1609 by dyak Dragul in the same circumstances. Angelov’s suggestion was justified when a further attribution of five menaia to the Vratsa set was made: two were assigned to Yov, one to Dragul and the last three to one or two anonymous scribes. All the manuscripts happened to be preserved in the National Library in Sofia. Conditionally grouped as regards their affiliation to either Yov’s or Dragul’s stile of handwriting, the latter closely follow a common model: the handwriting of a scribe who in my view could be identified as Peter daskalos, known by an apostolos of 1598 and to whom some more manuscripts have been attributed. The study of the menaia collection proved that a lectionary of a menaion (a selective menaion for September–November), presumably copied by Petar at about the 1580s or 1590s, was divided into smaller parts according to the services they comprised. These were complemented by the remaining daily services for the corresponding months and reworked into three single volumes. The September menaion was allocated to Yov, while those for October and November were entrusted to one, maybe two anonymous scribes. The partial reconstruction of Vratsa menaia collection shows a rare example of a scribal and literary practice but what is more, the script introduced by Peter daskalos, or, as Dilyana Radoslavova argues, by another copyist, raises anew the question about the relations between the principal literary centres in the Bulgarian lands – Vratsa and Etropole monasteries – in the first half of the seventeenth century.

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