Рилският манастир – история, памет, духовност
Rila Monastery: History, Memory, Spirituality

Summary/Abstract: The Collection entitled “Rila Monastery: History, Memory, Spirituality” is an unusual book, which kaleidoscopically both brings together and disseminates knowledge, ideas, and messages. The articles contained therein take us back into a world of rich spirituality, which we are still discovering. The book is a stage in the long-standing work of a research team led by Corr. Mem. Prof. Svetlana Kuyumdzhiyeva on a project, called Musical heritage of the Rila Monastery: Bilingual music manuscripts (Greek-Old Church Slavonic), which received funding by the Bulgarian National Science Fund and the Ministry of Education and Science. Earlier, under other projects on the musical heritage of the Rila Monastery, led again by Corr. Mem. Prof. Svetlana Kuyumdzhiyeva, two more collections were published along with a representative inventory of Slavic musical manuscripts kept in the library of this significant cultural hub of Bulgaria: one of the legacy of Hieromonk Neophyte of Rila viewed in theological, philological and arthistorical aspects, as well as a collection regarding the state and perspectives on the cultural heritage of the Rila Monastery. All this outlines an extensive scientific programme, implemented consistently by means of holding conferences and publishing conference texts. The prospectiveness of the programme lies not only in the implemented voluminous presentation of the cloister’s musical heritage (a sacred place of Bulgarian culture), but also in the opportunity to reconstruct as much of the Balkan Orthodox musical tradition and its European projections as possible, since the musical heritage of the Rila Monastery is representative of Balkan Orthodox music in its entirety. It is an interdisciplinary book. The texts are grouped in several thematic fields: historical, art-historical, philological, musicological, theological, historiographic, and palaeographic, with the participation of eminent scholars in these disciplines. Such a plentitude of research optics brings into focus the multilayeredness of the subject under consideration, and this is precisely what allows the opening of unexpected parallels and relations between events, phenomena and personalities that have left works of eternal spiritual value. Sofia: Iztok-Zapad, 2018, 342 p. (ISBN 978-619-01-0305-9)

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