In the middle of the nineteenth century, Rudolf Gutovski, a native of P oland and military doctor in the Ottoman Cossack army, gave the Jagiellonian Library six manuscripts in a patriotically motivated gift. In his imagination, the old Cyrillic artifacts were links between joint Slavic heritage and intended to enrich the collection in Krakow as a personal perpetuation. The collection of items from the Treskavets has a tradition involving scientists and church hierarchs from the Russian Empire. The manuscripts from the region, which are now kept in Russia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Poland, and Ukraine, demonstrate how the interests of different empires crossed in the Balkans region at the time. The manuscripts—Triodion of the Lent and Pentecostarion, a fragment of Four Gospels, three Liturgical Menaia, and Octoechos—were studied in the nineteenth century by F. Matejko, E. Kałużniacki, W. Wisłocki, J. Perwolf, and P. Syrku, but the articles with watermark studies propose more precise dating and full new descriptions for modern use.
Rudolf Gutowski’s Gift to the Jagiellonian Library: Medieval Cyrillic Manuscripts from the Macedonian Treskavec Monastery
Oleksandr Okhrimenko earned his PhD in history and is an Assistant Professor in the Art History Department, History Faculty, at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine). He is currently working on a project devoted to the newly discovered manuscripts from the collection of the Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine and introducing those codices to the scientific and general public. Among other topics of research, he works on the history of reading, the history of books (books as an object of collection), book migrations, and medieval fragmentology.
Stanislav Voloshchenko, PhD is a historian and codicologist. He was the head of the Museum of Old Ukrainian Books in Lviv (2017-2019), and now heads the Mission “Manuscript and Old Printed Heritage of the Kyiv Church: Archives, Libraries, Museums” of the Pereyaslav-Vyshneve Eparchy of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. He has researched the Cyrillic copies of the Jerusalem Typikon of the 15th-17th centuries in Ukrainian collections, which was embodied in the publication of the monograph (2021). He is the editor of two catalogues of Cyrillic manuscripts and old prints of the collections of the Basilian Fathers Monastery in Lviv (2015) and Kyiv Metropolitan Volodymyr Sabodan (2017). He researched Cyrillic manuscripts in the Library of the Princes of Czartoryski, the Jagiellonian Library and the National Library of Poland, thanks to research grants from Gaude Polonia, Polish Commission for UNESCO and Thesaurus Poloniae.
Oleksandr Okhrimenko, Stanislav Voloshchenko; Rudolf Gutowski’s Gift to the Jagiellonian Library: Medieval Cyrillic Manuscripts from the Macedonian Treskavec Monastery. Hiperboreea 1 June 2022; 9 (1): 29–68. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/hiperboreea.9.1.0029
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