Synaxarion of the Great Church

Synaxarion of the Great Church Synaxarion periechon holou tou eniautou tōn hagiōn kai tōn hosiōn en syntomō ta hypomnēmata, Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, ‘Synaxarion containing abstracts of deeds of the blessed saints and martyrs for the whole year’, ‘Synaxarion of the Great Church’ Date Late 9th century (P); between 945 and 959 (Synaxarion of Euaristus, H*); late 10th century (B*); late 10th-early 12th centuries (other recensions) Original Language Greek Description The Synaxarion of Constantinople is the liturgical book – though Synaxaries, together with other liturgical texts, are frequently part of larger collections – in which are recorded the commemorations for which offices (synaxeis) are celebrated according to the liturgical calendar of the Great Church, which was followed throughout the Byzantine world. These commemorations, several on each day, are diverse: fixed feasts of the Lord and of the Virgin, saints (most frequently), and memorials of various events (councils, translations of relics, earthquakes, sieges of Constantinople . .). Sometimes accom- panied by an indication of the place in which the office was held, they may be reduced to a brief mention, but often take the form of records of varying length (a few lines to a few dozen lines, and occasionally a few pages), particularly those related to passions of martyrs and much abbreviated saints’ lives, and they constitute the reading for the day during the canon in the morning service (orthros). These references are themselves called ‘synaxaries’ (by convention, with a lower case ‘s’). The Synaxarion is often connected in the manuscripts with the Typikon, the liturgical book that sets out the proper for each day (see Mateos, 1962-63). As readings for the Office, they are also found in the Menaia. Delehaye’s edition of the Synaxarion takes up 938 columns of a folio volume. synaxarion of the great church 575 The Synaxarion owes its origin to the deacon Euaristus who, during the personal reign of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (944-59), wrote the first book of this kind, which he dedicated to the emperor, and this is when the Synaxarion took the form in which we now find it: mostly a collection of notices. In his preface, preserved anony- mously in a Greek manuscript (in the Arabic translation, the Melkite Synaxarion [q.v.], the name of the author is given as h.w.r.s.t.s; see Sauget, 1969), Euaristus briefly outlines the principles that guided him in making abstracts of long hagiographical texts, especially the passions of the martyrs. This first stage of the text (recension H*, sepa- rated by Noret) is preserved in whole or in part in three manuscripts. The collection then evolved over the centuries. The fundamental work of the editor of the Synaxarion, H. Delehaye, taken further in the century that followed by others (Noret, Luzzi), makes it possible to distinguish seven recensions: H* (the primitive form), S* (later, to which belongs the Synaxarion of Sirmond, S, the base witness of Dele- haye’s edition), B* (the archetype of which is the famous Menologion of Basil II, Vat. gr. 1613, a manuscript illustrated with 430 miniatures presented to the Emperor Basil II in the late 10th century), C* (prob- ably an exclusively Italo-Greek recension, secondary to B*) D*, F* and finally M*, the most recent recension, which became prevalent in the 12th century. The Melkite Synaxarion (Sauget, 1969) is an 11th-century Arabic translation of a text close to that in MS G (see list of manuscripts below), which is an abbreviation of form F*. This classification omits a few individual manuscripts, since the history of the text of the Synaxarion, which was adapted and evolved with time and place, is still only imperfectly known. Patmiacus 266 (P in Delehaye) is a manuscript with contested dating (early 10th century according to Luzzi, or later), though its sanctoral is certainly ancient. Notices in it are rare and belong to a different textual tradition from the witnesses of the Synaxar- ion. Although P depends on a Constantinopolitan model, which it adapts to Palestinian usage, it is not strictly speaking a witness to the Constantinopolitan Synaxarion, but represents a step towards it. Thus, it will only be referred to here as a witness to the diffusion of a saint’s cult. Because it exists in so many recensions, the Synaxarion is treated here as an anonymous work, although the key role of Euaristus should now be recognized..

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