The paper deals with the early stages of the manuscript history of the Old Church Slavonic translation of the Alphabetical Stichera from the Great Canon of Repentance by St. Andrew of Crete included in the Triodia. The text was studied diachronically by comparative analysis of the variants from different text versions dating from the 12th up to the 14th century as well as its Greek original. Three main versions of the Slavonic text, the result of translation and/or subsequent correction on the basis of the Greek original, were established: the Bitola Triodion version, going back to the early glagolic tradition, the acrostic version, representing the early Cyrillic tradition, and finally the third one, found in the Triodia of the GIM type – a version without acrostic, probably the result of the Preslav correction of books. Special attention was paid to the second version and to the ways it succeeded in preserving the acrostic of the origin. It was also shown that the other variants of the text found in the South Slavonic as well as the East Slavonic manuscripts were composed by compiling separate stichera from the second and the third main versions. The results of the comparative investigation revealed that all translations and corrections of the text were performed in the South Slavic region.
Татьяна Борисова (Афины, Греция)