site.btaBulgarian Delegation Tours Zograf Monastery Library

A Bulgarian delegation led by Deputy Prime Minister Atanas Zafirov, which started a two-day visit to Mt Athos on Monday, was shown around the library at Zograf Monastery. Earlier in the day, the new hegumen of the monastery, Hieromonk Gabriel, showed the delegation miracle-working icons of St George.

The delegation is on a traditional Bulgarian pilgrimage for the feast of Zograf Monastery.

Gabriel took the guests to the place where the draft of Slav Bulgarian History was discovered. This seminal book, dating from 1762, was written by scholar and clergyman Paisius of Hilendar to remind the Bulgarians of their glorious past during the period of Ottoman Turkish rule.

The history of the creation of Slav Bulgarian History is presented in a small exposition at Zograf Monstery. The display starts with a copy of the Gospel, because the book was written as a spin-off from the Bible, Gabriel explained. “This is probably the only history written as a biblical story, based on the assumption that the Bulgarians are heirs of those biblical places which you and we inherited,” he said.

The guests saw the oldest manuscripts kept at Zograf, dating from the 10th century, decades after the Bulgarian alphabet was created. “There are very few artifacts left from that period documenting our alphabet,” the hegumen explained. Some of the sheets carry famous words by Basil the Great, a 3rd century Church Father who defended the faith against the Arian heresy. The translation from Basil was written in the Cyrillic alphabet, which disproves the theory that the Cyrillic system developed after the Glagolitic script. These sheets are evidence that the Cyrillic and the Glagolitic developed simultaneously, including in the second Bulgarian capital Preslav, where the Cyrillic was thought to have been introduced from Ohrid. It is possible that the “Zograf sheets” date back before the 10th century, Gabriel said.

The delegation also saw the oldest document attesting to the existence of Zograf Monastery by 980, when an adjacent landplot was bought. The document shows that by that time the monastery had a full-fledged records office. The written records preserved at Zograf also include chrysobulls (decrees) issued by a Byzantine monarch, by the Bulgarian King Ivan Alexander, by Stephen III, who was Prince of Moldavia, and by Sultan Mehmed II, who conquered Constantinople. “All of them left their mark on the history of the monastery either as donors or by granting the monastery some privilege. This enabled Paisius of Hilendar to research his book and draw up a timeline of the history of the Bulgarians,” Gabriel said.