Stray Leaves from an Ancient Triodion

A guest post by Georgi Parpulov*

1. A triodion is a liturgical book containing hymns for the church festivals of the “movable” cycle, i.e. those whose date changes from year to year depending on the date of Easter. The earliest surviving manuscript of this kind seems to be MS Athens, National Library of Greece, 626, copied in tenth-century bouletée minuscule. It is followed at no more than a few decades’ distance by MS Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery, Gr. 734–735 (these two shelfmarks actually refer to a single codex), copied in an “Ephraim-type” hand of the mid-tenth century.

2. A recent blog post by Peter Tarras prompted me to take a look at Katalog 500 (1922) of the Leipzig bookseller Karl W. Hiersemann (1854–1928).¹ As luck would have it, I quickly noticed that Hiersemann’s Item 4 (see fig. 1) is a detached fragment from the aforesaid Sinai triodion: the seven leaves once in Leipzig measure 255 × 200 mm as compared to 256 × 198 mm for their “parent manuscript”, they are copied by the same hand as the latter and are filled, just like it, with 26 lines to a page. Hiersemann’s folia come from a supplement (of which only four pages, the present-day ff. 1–2, still remain in place) that the scribe added after he had copied the triodion proper. The latter now starts on f. 3r, while a note on f. 50r refers readers to the extra material at the front. Because they were supplied as an afterthought, hymns on the extra leaves are not lined up strictly according to the church calendar: Anton Baumstark (1872–1948) rightly noted in his description of the Leipzig fragment that “merkwürdigerweise folgen die Stücke nicht der Ordnung des Kirchenjahres nach aufeinander”.²

3. Alas, I do not know the present whereabouts of the seven folia which Hiersemann offered for sale in 1922. They are important because they originate from one of the oldest surviving Greek triodia. Perhaps this blog post might catch the eye of their current owner or custodian.³

* Georgi Parpulov (M.A. History, University of Sofia; Ph.D. Art History, University of Chicago) studies Greek and Cyrillic manuscripts. He recently published Catena Manuscripts of the Greek New Testament (2021) and Middle-Byzantine Evangelist Portraits (2022). Some older blog posts by him can be found here, here, and here.

Published: 12 September 2023. Last updated: 23 April 2024. License: CC BY-NC. Download PDF

1. See Karl W. Hiersemann, Katalog 500: Orientalische Manuskripte: Arabische, syrische, griechische, armenische, persische Handschriften des 7.-18. Jahrhderts [sic]: meist theologischen, vorzüglich kirchen- u. liturgiegeschichtlichen Inhalts von hoher Bedeutung z. gr. Tl. Inedita und Unica (Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann, 1922). [↩]
2. Anton Baumstark in Hiersemann, Katalog 500, p. 8; Eng. tr.: “it is worth noting that the pieces do not follow one another in the order of the church year”. [↩]
3. According to Bernard Outtier, “Le sort des manuscrits du ‘Katalog Hiersemann 500’“, Analecta Bollandiana, 93/3-4 (1975), pp. 377-380, at p. 378, and Werner Strothmann, “Die syrischen Handschriften der Sammlung Adam-Goslar“, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Supplement III, 1: XIX. Deutscher Orientalistentag (1975) (1977), pp. 281-284, at p. 287, the manuscript was owned by Arnold Mettler-Specker (1867-1945), who deposited it in the University Library of Zurich until 1942, possibly under the shelfmark Or. 70. It was later bought at auction by Dawson’s Book Shop, Los Angeles. [↩]

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