Irena Spadijer

Serbian literature at the time of King Milutin reflects a continuation of two parallel, yet complementary trends that can be traced to their very beginnings a century earlier. Mount Athos (primarily the monastery of Hilandar and the kellion at Karyes) and the Serbian lands were the hubs of literary creativity. The paper presents the literary works of the most significant Serbian writers of the period: Teodosije, Grigorije of Ras and Danilo II of Peć.

Sveta Gora Atonska je že več kot tisočletje najbolj posebna meniška skupnost v Evropi. Čeprav je bila s svojo lego izolirana od preostalega sveta, so se v njej čutila tudi oddaljena vrenja v evropski zgodovini in posledično tudi reformacija ni minila brez odmevov. V prispevku je predstavljeno eno izmed tovrstnih pričevanj – poslanica Gavrila Svetogorca ogrskemu kralju Ivanu Zapolji, verjetno iz leta 1533/1534. Gavrilo Svetogorac, pravoslavni menih, je večkrat izpričan v virih, in sicer kot prevajalec iz grščine v srbščino. V času, ko si je dopisoval z ogrskim vladarjem, je bil protos, tj. starešina Svete Gore. Na prošnjo Ivana Zapolje je Gavrilo podal svoje mnenje o Martinu Lutru ter svoje videnje posameznih dogodkov iz zgodovine Katoliške cerkve. S časom pisanja in s stališči, ki jih je predstavil v poslanici, se je svetogorski protos Gavrilo aktivno vključil v aktualne evropske dogodke. Mount Athos has been the most specific monastic community in Europe for over a thousand years. ...

The paper deals with two death scenes depicted in the Old Serbian Literature: one in the Life of Saint Simeon written by St. Sava, and the other in the Life of Queen Jelena written by Danilo II, the Archbishop of Peć. The author points to the specific place that these two scenes have in the corpus of Serbian medieval literature, identifies both the common and distinguishing elements in them, and analyses the scenes from the perspective of the traditional hagiographic topoi and the author’s standpoint regarding this topic.

The article analyses the Life of St Simeon authored by the first Serbian king, Stefan the First-Crowned. The article deals with the transposition of reality and real historical events into a literary, cultic text in cases where the author consciously emphasises his presence which we know to be unquestionable. The questions posed and answered in the article are the following: In that case, do the narration and descriptions of the experienced reality differ from common fiction, a customary literary procedure used to (re)construct the reality and “reinforce” the credibility of the text? Is the author’s presence at the events that he writes about the guarantee of authenticity or not?

Manuscript No. 28, the Ascetic Miscellany written in Serbian Church
Slavonic in 1364 and kept at the St. Panteleimon Monastery on Mount
Athos, contains excerpts from patristic writings, works of the Orthodox
Church holy fathers (John Chrysostom, Isaac the Syrian, Maximus the
Confessor, Simeon the New Theologian, Gregory of Sinai, Simeon
of Mesopotamia, and Athanasius of Alexandria). Within this context,
the codex also contains a text written in the middle of the 14th century
by a Serbian author, Monk Siluan. Apart from revealing the previously
unknown work by an old Serbian writer, the manuscript testifies to
an important fact: one Slavic monk from Mount Athos found himself
in the company of the renowned Orthodox Church writers and
thinkers whose texts are read in the solitude of monastic cells and
whose advice and recommendations help ascetics, establishing them
in the faith and their hesychast way of life. The paper presents an
edition of Siluan’s text.

The structure of the Slavic menaion, especially the oldest examples, is a topic that has not been fully researched yet and it is still very intriguing. The early Greek menaia, dating back to very ancient times, were probably reflected in the early versions that determined the specificity of the Slavic (translated) menaion. The main classification in the chronological sequence of this type of liturgical book, and in relation to its structure, is between the Studite (Evergetis) and the so-called Jerusalem type ‒ relative to the type of typikon that regulated the liturgical practice.
The paper does not look in detail into the differences in the structure of the menaion of the pre-Jerusalem and Jerusalem types. These differences are analysed by relying on the surviving 13th- and 14th-century menaia and some manuscripts written much later, but from  antigraphs of great antiquity. These later-date copies of an archaic structure were created, as a rule, in the peripheral parts of specific communities, on the edges of the main trends, and they belong to the secondary, lateral sides of the copying tradition that preserved the traces of the long-lost liturgical practice.
However, regarding the structural diversity of the services in the Menaion No. 11 from the St. Panteleimon monastery (RPMA 11), it is necessary to draw attention to two marginalia in this codex (f. 136b and f. 232а), that reveal possible reasons for the specific composition of this particular manuscript. The Menaion No. 11 belongs to the transitional type, containing some features of the Jerusalem type, whereas the compositional diversity of the religious services in it may be the feature of this “transience”, the disordered and unharmonised liturgical practice. On the other hand, such diversity is the consequence of the different templates used by the scribe/editor. Furthermore, the marginalia analysed in this paper are indicative of something else as well: the factor of coincidence is sometimes present in the solutions observed in the manuscript codices. This fact not only shows that our conclusions may not be set in stone and that the results obtained may be misleading, but also that we should be very careful when drawing conclusions about the types and the structure of these liturgical miscellanies.

Contrary to Western medieval body of thought on literature, in reference to which a number of normative poetics emerged as of the 11th century, in the Eastern, Byzantine tradition there were no handbooks or normative theoretical deliberations on poetic creation whatsoever. Nevertheless, there were implicit genre patterns and rules to which eastern authors stuck to. Byzantine tradition found its place in Slavic and then in Serbian literature, which was a reflection of a uniform understanding of art throughout the entire Slavia Orthodoxa. The paper looks into the poetic standpoints that can be found in the works authored by Saint Sava, Teodosije Hilandarac, Danilo II (or Danilo of Peć) and Constantine the Philosopher (or Constantine of Kostenets). The rare, primarily implicit poetic views expressed by these Serbian writers, primarily reflected the necessity to articulate poetic language. In Saint Sava’s case, it is about his quest for as more concise artistic expression as possible, whereas when it comes to other authors mentioned in the paper, it is about the necessity to define the genre speech and genre structure (Danilo II, Constantine of Kostenets). More explicitly expressed viewpoints, such as those found in the works authored by Teodosije Hilandarac, sought to grasp the essence and function of literary creation. Nevertheless, all of them – both the implicit and the explicit – spoke unequivocally about the authors’ self-awareness, as well as about their attachment to a broader poetic heritage of the European Middle Ages, i.e. the tradition of almost entire pre-modern European body of thought around the function and role of literature.

The paper deals with two death scenes depicted in the Old Serbian Literature: one in the Life of Saint Simeon written by St. Sava, and the other in the Life of Queen Jelena written by Danilo II, the Archbishop of Peć. The author points to the specific place that these two scenes have in the corpus of Serbian medieval literature, identifies both the common and distinguishing elements in them, and analyses the scenes from the perspective of the traditional hagiographic topoi and the author's standpoint regarding this topic.

Italian artist Paolo Sorrentino has marked the first decades of the 21th century not only in the art of film-making, but also in literature. Apart from several significant films that he directed, he published two novels and one collection of short stories. It is therefore not surprising that his series The Young Pope (2016) possesses distinct literary characteristics. In fact, it is more a filmed novel in ten chapters than a typical TV series. Although the artistic expression of The Young Pope ‒ the characters, situations, music, editing ‒ is very contemporary and the issues that the series tackles may be considered universal, this work brings to life specific, and to an extent “hagiographic“, medieval topics. This is manifested most clearly in the main protagonist, pope Pius XIII, who is the subject of our analysis in this article. 
The portray of Lenny/Pius XIII is created on the principles of a medieval hero ‒ a saint, and the story of his life contains the features of a hagiographic narrative, such as: exceptional personality demonstrated since childhood, exposure to various temptations, the ability to perform miracles, the holiness. The Pope's ability to perform miracles, along with his faith ‒ which is relentessly and inexplicably tormented by doubts, and yet remains unswerving ‒ make him not only a saint, but a real medieval saint, a fully devout anchorite. He is a monk who does not deprive himself of the 21st century comfort of the papal lifestyle, while his self-deprivations are essentially of spiritual nature. It may seem at first glance that this type of a hero exists in the art of different epochs, but in fact it is typical of the medieval literature in which a strong faith and a complete, unquestionable loyalty to God are above all other human virtues and are key features of a hero in the medieval, hagiographic narrative.

The paper analyses the Serbian hymnography in the period of the Serbian Archbishopric through four phases of its development – four generations of writers. Saint Sava, the author of the first Serbian church service, and the unknown author of the first service dedicated to St Peter of Korisha belong to the first generation (early 13th century). The second generation of Serbian hymnographers (from the 30s to the 80s of the 13th century) includes anonymous authors of the oldest services dedicated to St Sava. Theodosius of Chilandar, the most prolific Serbian hymnographer of the last decades of the 13th century, is the representative of the third generation. Archibishop Danilo II, who wrote his works in the early 14th century, belongs to the fourth generation of writers.

The parchment manuscript codex No. 11 from the collection of the Russian Monastery of St. Panteleimon on Mount Athos (Panteleimon  11) dates back to the third and fourth decades of the 14th century. It is a Serbian menaion for the months December-February and it has not been preserved in its entirety. It contains two services dedicated to the first Serbian saints – Saint Simeon the Myroblite (the founder of the Nemanjić dynasty) and Saint Sava (the founder of the autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church and its first archbishop).
The services to the holy Serbs in the Panteleimon 11 show some common characteristics, but also significant differences. Both services are "dependent", joint (a foreign and a domestic saint together), which points to a relatively early stage in the formation of a cult of the personality that is being venerated. However, these early stages are not the same in both services. The intertwining of the canons and certain segments, as well as putting the local saint to the forefront - in the Service dedicated to St. Sava, on one hand, and, on the other, completely separate and successive units, i.e., the canons in the Service to St. Simeon that are not intertwined, seem to indicate a different degree of independence of the "pamyat" recorded in the protographs from which the template (“izvod”) of the St. Panteleimon menaion originates.

Mount Athos has been the most specific monastic community in Europe for over a thousand years. Though isolated from the rest of the world, the community has always reflected the turning points in European history, including Reformation. The paper looks at one testimony of this kind – the Epistle of the protos Gavrilo Svetogorac (Gavrilo from Mount Athos) to John Zapolya, Hungarian king, written probably in 1533/1534. At the request of John Zapolya, Gavrilo offers his opinion about Martin Luther as well as his view on certain events in the history of the Catholic Churc. Judging by the time when the epistle was written, and the attitudes expressed in it, the protos of Mount Athos was actively involved in the events in Europe in that particular period.

The Service to St. Simeon, written by St. Sava, has not been published yet and, despite the fact that there are only a few copies of it, its manuscript heritage has not been fully explored either. Menaion No. 11, written in the early 14th century and archived in the collection of the St. Panteleimon monastery on Mt Athos, has been selected for the purposes of this paper from several copies spanning the period from the mid-13th century to the 30s of the 17th century. This manuscript contains a very old copy of the St. Sava’s Service to St. Simeon that has been unknown to scholars to this day. The paper looks at the structure of the Service presented in the Menaion No. 11 and its place in the manuscript tradition.
What is particularly interesting about this copy is that it contains the Prologue Life of St. Simeon which does not exist in any other manuscript of the Service. For this reason, the Prologue is presented in its full form in the Appendix.

Danica Popović, Branislav Todić and Dragan Vojvodić, Dečanska pustinja. Skitovi i kelije manastira Dečana [English summary: The Dečani Desert. The Sketae and Kellia of the Monastery of Dečani]. Belgrade: Insitute for Balkan Studies and Interdepartmental Committee of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts for the Study of Kosovo and Metohija, 2011, pp.282, ills.136. ¬– Balcanica XLIII (2012), 347-350 (in English)