The blog about things that should not be forgotten
~ Monday, August 14, 2023 ~
Pavel Šimánek stopped answering email in March. I assumed he was travelling, or had changed address, or was simply doing the thing that independent researchers sometimes do when they are deep in something: ignoring everything that is not the work. In June a mutual acquaintance forwarded a notebook. I have been sitting on it since then. I am publishing this because I think someone else should know the notebook exists. I am not sure what it means.
~ Wednesday, March 15, 2023 ~
Seven parchment leaves. Thirty-eight prayer formulas. The oldest surviving codex written in Glagolitic script. Discovered in 1874 at the library of the Kiev Theological Academy, acquired from Jerusalem sometime in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Before Jerusalem: nothing documented. Before nothing: Great Moravia, perhaps 900 AD, a scriptorium that no longer exists in a political entity that was destroyed before anyone thought to record where its books went.