On March 22, the Slovenia-based Forum of Slavic Cultures held a small exhibition at the Brdo Congress Centre highlighting one of the most ancient pieces of Cyrillic literary heritage, the Supraśl Codex
Composed in Old Church Slavonic, the Supraśl Codex (Latin: Codex Suprasliensis) is a manuscript that contains an incomplete collection of the lives of saints, a number of homilies, one prayer, and the offices for one month of the Church calendar, March (the March Menaion). Twenty of these liturgical texts are attributed to John Chrysostom, one to Epiphanius of Cyprus, and one to Patriarch Photius; all are literary monuments in the history of Cyrillic writing and might have been translated from Greek into Old Church Slavonic by the disciples of Cyril and Methodius following their deaths – the manuscript dates back to the mid-11th century. With 285 large-format parchment folios in the same handwriting, this is the most voluminous literary work in Old Church Slavonic, presumed to have been written in north-eastern Bulgaria.
The manuscript was discovered by Russian Slavicist Mikhail Bobrovsky in the library of the Supraśl Orthodox Monastery outside Bialystok in 1823. Later, the manuscript was split into three parts, which are now kept in three different locations: 151 folios from the private collection of the Zamojscy family are now kept at the National Library in Warsaw; 118 folios are at the National and University Library in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in the archive of a pioneer of Slavonic studies, Slovenian linguist and philologist Jernej Kopitar (1780-1844); and 16 folios are at the Russian National Library in St Petersburg.
The second part of the manuscript was published in Vienna in 1851 by Slovenian Professor Franjo Miklošević, who taught Slavistics at Vienna University. The third part was published in St Petersburg in 1868 by Russian philologist Izmail Sreznevsky, who made a significant contribution to Slavic studies. The full version of the manuscript was first published in St Petersburg in 1904, then in Austria in 1956, and in Bulgaria in 1982.
In 2007, UNESCO included the Supraśl Codex on its Memory of the World List.
The remarkable history of the discovery, research, and publication of the Supraśl Codex through the joint efforts of representatives of various Slavic nations can explain Slovenia's choice of the manuscript as the centrepiece of their exhibition devoted to the Slavs' common cultural heritage.
