A Wandering Leaf between Hilandar, Sinai, and the Vatican: The Case of Ott. gr. 424 and Sinai Slav. 28

A guest post by Aleksandar Anđelović*

1. The manuscript Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ott. gr. 424 (Diktyon: 65667) is a 9th-century Greek manuscript, now in the Vatican Library, containing the homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus. The manuscript was brought to the Vatican from Sinai,¹ and its scattered fragments – some remaining on Sinai, one now in Leipzig – allow us to reconstruct something of its interesting earlier history: the codex had been brought to Sinai in the 12th century by Ṣāʿid ibn Dānīl ibn Bišr, an Arabic collector of antiquarian Greek manuscripts.² It is against this background that its peculiar fol. 56 demands attention (Figure 1): amid Gregory’s homilies in this 9th-century codex a Slavonic folio of a smaller format has been interpolated,³ carrying the liturgical text for 2 May, the feast of Athanasius of Alexandria – a text with no apparent content relation to the surrounding Greek material. The question of how it came to be there is worth pursuing.

2. Since Ott. gr. 424 had been on the Sinai since the 12th century, and the interpolated Slavonic folio is clearly of a much later date than the 9th-century codex into which it was inserted, the natural place to begin is the Slavonic manuscript material preserved at Sinai. There, one finds the manuscript Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery, Slav. 28 (Figure 2), an incomplete 14th-century menaion in the Serbian recension of Church Slavonic covering May through August, whose opening folios are now missing and which, in its present state, begins only with the last portion of the services for 8 May. Through the work of Lucija Cernić in the 1980s, the manuscript is more precisely dated to 1370-1380 and is attributed to Job, a monk from Hilandar whose name appears explicitly on fol. 215v, and to whose workshop – comprising some fifteen other scribes – a substantial number of other manuscripts are assigned.⁴

3. The precise circumstances under which Sinai Slav. 28 reached the Sinai remain unclear. Serbian manuscripts were produced on Sinai itself in the 14th century, e.g. within the scribal milieu of the monks Janikije and Jakov that is securely attested there,⁵ and a similar context of production cannot be ruled out for Sinai Slav. 28. Nevertheless, the overwhelming concentration of Job’s surviving output and that of his assistants – more than twenty manuscripts – attested as being produced at Hilandar makes it considerably more likely that this manuscript as well was produced on Mount Athos and then sent to the monks at Sinai at the end of the 14th century.

4. What connects the fol. 56 from Ott. gr. 424 and Sinai Slav. 28 is primarily the handwriting. A mere look at both the interpolated folio from Ott. gr. 424 and the opening of the services for 9 May on fol. 5r of Sinai Slav. 28 reveals not only the hand of the same scribe but also strongly suggests that the inserted folio now in Ott. gr. 424 was taken directly from Sinai Slav. 28. In other words, at some point after the 1380s, both manuscripts were present together on Sinai: Ott. gr. 424 had been there since the 12th century, while Sinai Slav. 28 arrived (most probably) from Mount Athos after 1380. Given that Sinai Slav. 28 now begins only with a portion of 8 May and its opening folios are lost, the most plausible conclusion is that the folio now preserved in Ott. gr. 424 was among those initial missing leaves that were at some point torn from the Serbian menaion on Mount Sinai. This, however, only answers half the question as the folio’s presence in Ott. gr. 424 is not self-explanatory, i.e. it was not simply slipped between pages but its edges had been cut which reduced it to a smaller format than the other folios of Sinai Slav. 28, and it was subsequently properly glued onto a new page that fits the dimensions of the Greek codex, which all points to a deliberate intervention. But when, and why there?

5. One might be tempted to read some theological intentionality into the intervention. The Slavonic folio carries the service for Athanasius of Alexandria, praising him as the defender of Nicene Orthodoxy and the scourge of Arianism, and both Gregory of Nazianzus and Athanasius are, as is well known, pillars of the same Trinitarian tradition. Hence, a temptation to see a meaningful theological juxtaposition would be understandable. The immediate material surrounding fol. 56, however, does not support this reading. The homilies on either side of the folio are both occasioned by specific circumstances of Gregory’s own ecclesiastical career,⁶ and there is no liturgical logic that would place a service for Athanasius at precisely this point.  To understand what likely happened, it helps to note that Sinai Slav. 28 was already a disrupted manuscript: fol. 272, for instance, contains part of a service to Saint Stephen in Bulgarian redaction that does not belong to the manuscript proper, while fols. 273 and 274 are out of their place and belong back at the beginning,⁷ which is evidence that the codex had attracted other material and was not in a ‘stable’ state. The loss of the beginning thus should not be seen as an isolated accident.

6. The evidence, therefore, points instead toward a practical explanation. Namely, while on Sinai, one of the detached folios from Sinai Slav. 28’s lost beginning eventually found its way into Ott. gr. 424; whether it had been previously used independently as a liturgical text or as a bookmark already on Sinai cannot be established. Its usage in the Vatican, however, could be explained with more certainty: in conversation with Giulia Rossetto, I learned that upon the last rebinding of Ott. gr. 424 – which took place most probably in the Vatican – the modern paper used for the flyleaves and for the folio into which the Slavonic folio was inserted appears to be the same, suggesting that they belong to the same intervention. Rossetto also noted that the loose folio had been placed precisely at the boundary between quire 18 and quire 19 and that it was simply left in place when the new binding was made. In other words, the restorer in the Vatican who encountered the Serbian folio did not read Slavonic and therefore had no way of knowing what the folio contained or where it had come from. Unfamiliar with its content and finding it already in position, the restorer decided to incorporate it into the restored codex where he found it.

7. This small case study leaves several questions open, and deliberately so. The plausible physical journey of Sinai Slav. 28 from Hilandar to Sinai raises broader questions about the mechanics of manuscript travel between Mount Athos and Sinai in the late 14th century – the routes, the occasions, and the people involved – and about scribal and monastic needs and practices both along the way and within Serbian workshops on Sinai that are attested.⁸ The subsequent journey of Ott. gr. 424 from Sinai to the Vatican raises equally interesting questions about how manuscripts were handled, sorted, and restored in transit and upon arrival, and how much was altered in that process. The fate of the fol. 56 is presumably not unique.

8. Last but not least, this case is a small reminder that the Slavonic and specifically Serbian liturgical material from Sinai has not yet yielded all it has to offer. The manuscripts were known, and the landmark cataloguing work was done, but the material still offers considerable room for further exploration. Two recent studies have returned to this material and found new ground,⁹ and there is every reason to expect more.

* Dr. Aleksandar Anđelović is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Medieval Research, Division of Byzantine Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences, and a member of the the FWF Cluster of Excellence ‘EurAsian Transformations’ (Grant DOI: 10.55776/COE8). He completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Vienna in 2025, where he worked on the ERC-project RELEVEN. His doctoral research, currently being prepared for publication, dealt with intellectual history and the politics of knowledge in eleventh-century Constantinople, with a focus on Michael Psellos, patriarchal power, and ecclesiastical education. In 2025 he was a Byzantine Studies Summer Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks. His current research focuses on Byzantine influence on medieval Serbian intellectual and liturgical culture in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with particular attention to the transmission of hesychastic textual toolkits, monastic networks, homiliaries, and manuscript circulation between Mount Athos, Jerusalem, and Sinai.

1. For the full and detailed overview of the history of this manuscript, see https://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr/notices/cote/65667/. It was brought by Andrea Scandar in the eighteenth century alongside many other manuscripts from Sinai, as discussed previously on this blog, see https://medisi.hypotheses.org/7530. [↩]
2. For a detailed description of Ott. gr. 424, see P. Orsini, “Nuovi frammenti del codice Vat. Ottob. gr. 424“, Codices Manuscripti & Impressi, 95/96 (2014), pp. 1-14;  For Ṣāʿid ibn Dānīl ibn Bišr, his collection, and its connection to Sinai, see M. A. Kurysheva, “Библиотека греческих манускриптов С̣ā‛ида ибн Даниила ибн Бишра XII века [Ṣāʿid ibn Dānīl ibn Bišr’s Library of Greek Manuscripts in 12th century]”, Srednie veka, 78/1-2 (2017), pp. 154-169. [↩]
3. In the 19th century, the language of the inserted Slavonic folio was labelled as “Ruthenian”; see E. Feron, F. Battaglini (eds.), Codices manuscripti graeci Ottoboniani Bibliothecae Vaticanae (Rome: Vatican Press, 1893), p. 236: “pars sticherorum in S. Athanasium Alexandrinum ad diem 2 Maii descripta characteribus et lingua ruthenicis”. [↩]
4. See the initial observations in L. Cernić, “Белешке о писарима неких српских рукописа у манастир Свете Катарине на синаjу [A Note on the Writing Style of Certain Serbian Manuscripts at the Monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai]“, Археографски прилози, 4 (1982), pp. 19-62, at p. 28, and then, more substantially, devoted only to Job and his circle, L. Cernić, “Круг Писара Jова [The Circle of Job the Scribe]“, Археографски прилози, 12 (1990), pp. 129-180. [↩]
5. Cernić, “Белешке о писарима”, p. 21. [↩]
6. The homily immediately preceding the inserted fol. 56 is Gregory’s oration To Himself, on His Return from the Country after the Affair of Maximus, and the one following it is The Farewell in the Presence of the Bishops Gathered at the Martyrium of Saint Anastasia. [↩]
7. As noted by Cernić, “Белешке о писарима”, p. 28. [↩]
8. There are several attested cases of liturgical manuscripts being sent from Mount Athos to Slavic monks on Sinai in the 14th century, both in the case of Serbs and Bulgarians, see I. C. Tarnanidis, The Slavonic Manuscripts Discovered in 1975 at St Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai (Thessaloniki: Hellenic Association for Slavic Studies, 1988), pp. 28-29. In general, Slavonic manuscript production in a Serbian context flourished in the second half of the 14th century, see M. Riparante, “An Overview of the Main Scriptoria in the 14th Century Slavic Balkans: Serbian Writing activity“, Kirilo-Metodievski Studii, 32 (2022), pp. 13-32. [↩]
9. See N. Glibetić, “The ‘New Finds’ Glagolitic Manuscripts as Sources for Medieval Serbian Liturgical History”, in A. Jeftić, M. Knežević, R. Kisić (eds), Вера и мисао у вртлогу времена: Књига у част митрополита Амфилохија (Радовића) и епископа Атанасија (Јевтића) (Beograd-Podgorica-Foča, 2021), pp. 187-200; V. Savić, “Српски међу словенским рукописима у манастиру Свете Катарине на Синају (XI–XII бек) [The connection between Serbian and Slovenian manuscripts at St Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai (11th–12th centuries)]“, Crkvene studije, 19 (2022), pp. 15-43, https://crkvenestudije-churchstudies.com/index.php/studies/issue/view/22 [↩]

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