The Kiev Folia and the Last Glagolitic House
~ 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.
The Kiev Folia have been studied primarily as a linguistic monument — they are the oldest witnesses to the Old Church Slavonic literary language, and their archaic morphology has generated substantial scholarly attention. What has received less attention is the question of their physical journey. A manuscript does not travel from ninth-century Moravia to nineteenth-century Jerusalem on its own. Someone carried it. Someone stored it. Someone, at some point, decided it was worth preserving. The silence around these decisions is not accidental. It is the silence of a transmission that was not meant to be documented.
What the folios contain
The seven leaves contain thirty-eight prayer formulas of the Roman Mass. Not the Byzantine liturgy — the Roman one. This distinction has been noted by scholars and then, for the most part, set aside. It is not a small distinction.
Cyril and Methodius, who brought the Glagolitic writing system into Great Moravia in the 860s, operated initially within Rome’s sphere. Methodius held a papal mandate. The mission was Slavonic in language and script but Roman in its ecclesiastical orientation. After Methodius died in 885, his disciples — including Gorazd, to whom the Kiev Folia are commonly attributed, or at least to his school — were expelled from Moravia by German bishops who had no interest in a Slavonic liturgy they could not control. Most of the disciples went south. Most of what followed in the Slavic liturgical tradition moved eventually into the Byzantine orbit. The Roman-rite Glagolitic tradition had no obvious home after 885.
The Reims Gospels as comparison
Before addressing where the Kiev Folia may have traveled, it is useful to note that Glagolitic manuscripts did travel, and that they traveled in directions that scholarship has sometimes found surprising.
The Reims Gospels — the Evangeliarium used at the coronation of French kings from the eleventh century onward, on which the monarchs of France swore their oath of office for nearly seven hundred years — contain a Glagolitic section alongside Cyrillic text. How a Glagolitic manuscript came to serve the coronation rites of the French crown is itself a long question. The point here is narrower: that a Glagolitic manuscript was, in the eleventh century, moving through networks that connected Bohemia, the Frankish royal court, and the broader European pilgrimage and diplomatic infrastructure. Manuscripts moved. The routes were real.
Sázava
There is one institution in eleventh-century Bohemia that held Glagolitic manuscripts, maintained the Slavonic liturgy, and was then dissolved.
The monastery of Sázava was founded by Procopius — Sv. Prokop — on a hermitage site above the Sázava river, sometime in the 1030s. Prokop had been educated at Vyšehrad, at the Old Slavonic chapter there — the last functioning school of the Cyrillomethodian tradition in Bohemia. The men who taught him were the last generation of something older. He carried what they gave him into the forest and then into the monastery he built. For sixty years, Sázava was the only Glagolitic house in Bohemia.
In 1097, Vratislav II expelled the Slavonic monks from Sázava and replaced them with Latin Benedictines. The monks left for Hungary, where a Slavonic monastery offered them refuge. Some of their manuscripts went with them. What happened to those manuscripts in Hungary is not well documented. What happened to the manuscripts that did not leave with the monks is not documented at all.
The standard position is that the Sázava scriptorium’s holdings were absorbed into the new Latin community’s library, and that most were eventually lost. This is plausible. It is not the only possibility.
The Jerusalem route
Bohemian pilgrimage to Jerusalem was active from the eleventh century. The royal court had diplomatic and devotional connections to the Latin Kingdom. Czech magnates are documented on crusade and pilgrimage. Objects and manuscripts moved along these routes in both directions — devotional gifts, relics, texts carried as acts of piety.
A Roman-rite Glagolitic manuscript, understood by its carriers as ancient and holy, is precisely the kind of object that might travel as a devotional gift. Not studied. Not copied. Carried, given, stored in a library where it was not understood and therefore not discarded.
The Kiev Folia surface at Jerusalem’s presence in a library in Kiev. The connection between Jerusalem and Kiev in the nineteenth century was ecclesiastical — the Russian Orthodox presence in the Holy Land, the institutional networks that brought manuscripts into Russian collections. Someone in Jerusalem had the folios. Someone in Jerusalem had held them long enough that by the mid-nineteenth century they were simply part of the inventory of what was there.
Who carried them to Jerusalem, and when, the record does not say.
A marginal notation
I want to note something I found while working through an eighteenth-century Benedictine reconstruction of Sázava’s pre-expulsion holdings — a scholarly catalogue compiled from scattered references, assembled well after the original documents had dispersed. In the margin beside one entry, there is a mark I have seen in other contexts.
I am not going to describe it here. Readers who have followed the work I have published on the keeper tradition — on what the custodian literature calls the permanent vessel, the mark on the structure that outlasts its bearer — will understand why I am cautious. What I will say is that the mark’s presence in this marginal position, beside an entry that concerns a manuscript described only as “fragmentum antiquissimum, charactere incognito” — a very ancient fragment in an unknown script — is not something I can account for within the normal framework of monastic cataloguing.
Glagolitic script would, to an eighteenth-century Latin Benedictine compiler, be charactere incognito. An unknown script.
I am not claiming to have found the Kiev Folia’s trail. I am noting that the thread exists, that it runs in the direction I would expect, and that someone, at some point, thought the fragment significant enough to mark.
What traveled
The Kiev Folia are not an anomaly. They are evidence of a transmission that continued for a long time by routes that scholarship has not fully examined. Roman-rite Glagolitic, the oldest surviving codex, in Jerusalem. The direction of travel is eastward. The tradition is westward. Something moved against its own current, and held.
The monastery at Sázava was the last place in Bohemia where what Prokop carried was tended with full understanding. After 1097, the understanding dispersed — into Hungary, into the hands of monks who had no successor house, into manuscripts that moved according to the logic of gift and pilgrimage rather than institutional continuity.
Whether the Kiev Folia passed through Sázava, I cannot demonstrate. What I can say is that the path from Moravia to Jerusalem runs through the only place in Bohemia that would have known what the folios were. The silence between them is not the silence of absence. It is the silence of a transmission that was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
Related
- The Missions North of the Danube — the pre-Carolingian missionaries; the tradition Prokop inherited at Vyšehrad
- Those Who Held the Sign — the keeper tradition; the permanent vessel; the mark that outlasts its bearer
- The Number Beyond the Count — on what survives by being distributed and left incomplete