Vera Tchentsova NEW RESEARCH ON MAZEPA’S ARABIC GOSPEL (1708)

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Tchentsova Vera ERC Typarabic (Bucharest); EPHE/PSL (Paris) NEW RESEARCH ON MAZEPA’S ARABIC GOSPEL (1708) Research work on the Arabic Gospels with the coats-of-arms of Ivan Mazepa, Zaporizhian Cossack hetman, and of Daniel Apostol, Myrhorod Cossack colonel, published in Aleppo in 1708, is a part of a big international ERC project «TYPARABIC. Cultural Transfers between Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Near East in the 18th Century» (2021-2026, principal investigator Ioana Feodorov). The goal of this project is to provide new information on the first Arabic typographies in the Ottoman provinces of the Eastern Mediterranean and in Eastern Europe (Romanian principalities, Syria, Lebanon). Hosted in the Institute for South-East European Studies in Bucharest this project permitted to organise collaboration of the international team of scholars from several countries, including Ukraine (Yulia Petrova, Alina Kondratiuk). In the frame of this project, I continue to examine archival documents related to the presence in Ukrainian territories of representatives of Athanasius III Dabbās, Patriarch of Antioch (1685–1694, 1720–1724), who founded the Arabic typography in Aleppo, and on the relations of this church hierarch with the hetman Ivan Mazepa [4]. Among the first books published in Aleppo in 1706 as a result of Athanasius Dabbās’ efforts and of material help obtained from the prince of Wallachia Constantin Brâncoveanu, were the Psalter, the Four Gospels and the Lectionary/Aprakos [3, p. 263-270]. Soon after, in 1708, followed the «second edition» of these two last books [3, p. 165-166, 175, 274]. The new variant of the Four Gospels was supplied with a page representing Ivan Mazepa’s coat-of-arms with an abbreviated Cyrillic inscription «Ivan Mazepa, hetman of his 218 serenissime Majesty the Tsar’s Zaporizhian Host and cavalier of the glorious order of Saint Andrew the Apostle» accompanied by its translation in Greek. The Lectionary appeared in the same year with the coat-of-arms of the Cossack colonel Daniel Apostol and an abbreviated inscription «Daniel Apostol, Myrhorod colonel of his serenissime Majesty the Tsar’s Zaporizhian Host». The woodcuts with the coats-of-arms, incorporated in the books to thank these new donators for their material support were executed in a style similar to representations of the coat-of-arms of the prince Constantin Brâncoveanu in various editions published in the principality of Wallachia or inserted in some of the exemplars of the Psalter from the Aleppo typography. In addition to the coats-of-arms the books were provided with Greek epigrams praising the donators, and Mazepa’s Gospel has also a laudatory introduction in Arabic language. These folii with dedications and woodcuts were added to the blocks of printed in 1706 book sheets, that were left unchanged [3, p. 271-274]. The copies of the Four Gospels dated 1708 are conserved in Bucharest (Library of the Academy of sciences of Romania), Kyiv (Vernadsky National library of Ukraine) and Saint-Petersburg (Russian National library). The unique known copy of Daniel Apostol’s Lectionary is conserved in the Russian State Archive of ancient acts in Moscow. All of the copies are well known in historiography, and a facsimile edition of the Kyiv exemplar of the Arabic Gospel was recently realized by Ihor Ostash, sponsored by the Metropolitan Volodymyr (Sabodan) Memorial Fund [2]. The new research on the 1708 editions permitted to make several observations. The last folio of all the three exemplars of Mazepa’s Gospel has manual corrections of the date, changed from 1706 to 1708. It confirms that the new 1708 «edition» was the same as that of 1706 but for the first folii, inserted in the book while preparing copies with the donator’s coat-of-arms to offer to the benefactor. Comparison of types, both Arabic and Greek, used to publish the books in Aleppo, with those, used by the typographers in Snagov and Bucharest to edit the Book of Three Devine liturgies (1701) and the Book of Hours (1702), permitted to conclude that they are different, even if they have very similar forms. It means that previous hypothesis that Athanasius Dabbās brought to his typography in Aleppo Arabic characters from Bucharest, needs a revision. It is necessary to continue this research and comparison of the fonts used by the first Arabic typographies in Eastern Europe and Ottoman Levant with contemporary editions both in Romanian principalities and in Western Europe (where Arabic printing with movable type existed from the 219 beginning of the 16th century). Aleppine fonts, both Arabic and Greek, also could have been created by the local typographer ʻAbdallāh Zāḫir, under whose supervision the books were published. He could have used Arabic and Greek types made in Wallachia as models for his own font design. Measuring of characters of Wallachian and Aleppine editions brought us to conclusion that the font size of Syrian editions is usually bigger and less elegant. In 1711 the typography in Aleppo ceased its work and nothing is known about the destiny of the types used in it. The last edition printed in Aleppo with the same Greek types as the books of Mazepa’s Gospel and Daniel Apostol’s Lectionary, is the book of the Sermons of Athanasius, Patriarch of Jerusalem (Aleppo, 1711). An introduction in Greek for this last Arabic Aleppine book was written by the sponsor of the edition, Chrysanthus Notaras, Patriarch of Jerusalem. The model for the woodcut with the image of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, decorating the book, probably could be identified with an engraving by Jacques Callot from his series of images dedicated to the Holy Land («Coupe longitudinale de la Basilique du Saint-Sépulcre») [5]. It demonstrates the close links of Aleppine typographers with the West and Western models, and could be one of the indices that the types used in the Syrian typography were also produced with the help of Western specialists. Analysis of documents, kept in the Russian State Archive of ancient acts and related to the arrival of Leontius the Cypriot, protosyncellus of Athanasius Dabbās, to the tsar’s court, permitted to make a hypothesis, that he must have appeared for the first time in Ukraine already in spring of 1707. Leontius brought with him several documents written by Athanasius Dabbās’ in Constantinople in December 1706 – February 1707, and the envoy’s way to Batouryn could have taken only a few months. If Ivan Mazepa decided to make his generous donation to Antiochian clerics immediately in summer of 1707, and the title page of Mazepa’s Gospel indicates the date of publication as January 1708, Dabbās’ representatives could have made their way to Aleppo and back to Ukraine rather quickly. In January 1708 the Gospel and Lectionary book blocks of 1706 were already supplied with the newly printed pages with engravings and with short Greek and Arabic texts, praising the donators. It is quite possible that Dabbās’ envoys were already at Mazepa’s residence before the capture of Batouryn by the tsar’s army (November 1708), and surely before the Poltava battle (1709). These time estimations permit to suppose that the Kyiv copy of Mazepa’s Gospel, previously kept in the Greek church in Nizhyn, could 220 be given to this church by Ivan Mazepa himself (as it was indicated in an inventory of the sacristy of the church, referred by A. Dmitrievsky [1, с. 10, 14]). All the other exemplars of the 1708 Gospels and Lectionary editions, as it seems, were prepared as luxurious presentation copies, binded in Kyiv, probably in the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. From Ukraine these very few luxurious copies were later dispersed to attain their actual places of conservation. The Saint-Petersburg and Moscow copies of the 1708 editions, probably somehow entered the library of Manuc Bey (1769-1817), rich merchant of Armenian origin and diplomat, who took part in OttomanRussian negotiations about Moldavian territories. It was Christophor Lazarev, functionary of the Russian empire of Armenian origin, married to Manuc Bey’s daughter, who offered the exemplar of Mazepa’s Gospel to the Imperial library in Saint-Petersburg. It happened immediately after Manuc Bey’s death, in 1818. The future comparison of a few Armenian annotations in Daniel Apostol’s Lectionary with Manuc Bey’s handwriting I intend to realise, will allow to confirm or reject this working hypothesis. The future research on the provenance of the known exemplars of the 1708 editions, hopefully, will shed some new light on this important episode of functioning of the printing house in Aleppo and on Mazepa’s donations to the Church of Antioch. 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