Textological Analyses of the Early (before the 14th century Athos corrections) Versions of the Stichera from the Great Canon by St. Andrew of Crete Service

The present paper deals with the reconstruction of the early stages of the manuscript history of the Slavonic translation of the Alphabetical Stichera from the Great Canon service from the Triodion. The text was studied diachronically by the comparative textological analysis of the variants from different text versions dating from 12th up to the 14th century. The comparison shows that the text concerned was at least three times corrected according to the Greek origin, resulting in 4 versions of the text as well as in numerous compilations of them. The first Church Slavonic translation of the Stichera used in the Glagolitic tradition is preserved in fragments in the Bulgarian manuscript of Bitola Triodion. Another early version of the Church Slavonic translation of the text reproduced the acrostic of the origin, resulting in the substantial alterations in the structure and the text of the hymn. The version composed before the 11th century continued to be used for various compilations in the Bulgarian and Serbian regions up to the 14th century, affecting all the text traditions that appeared there. On the contrary, with the exception of the small text fragments from the Moses Kianin Triodion, the acrostic version seems to be unknown in the East Slavic Region. The East Slavic traditions are based on the later Preslavl version without the acrostic which is more accurate in the representation of the structure and the text of the origin. The fragments of the version given can be seen in the Bulgarian and Serbian compilations. The fourth version of the Stichera existed only in the South Slavonic tradition and probably appeared during the second stage of the Preslavl book correction. It was also proved that all translations and corrections up to the Mount Athos book correction of the 13th-14th century were performed in the Bulgaria. This fact explains a great variety of the text traditions in the Bulgarian scripts as opposed to the East Slavonic and Serbian ones. The investigation shows the importance of the separate textological study of each text of the Triodion, though they differ significantly from the textological history of the entire collection.

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