Medieval and Manuscripts

Bible translations into Bulgarian

The royal Tetraevangelia of Ivan Alexander is an illuminated manuscript Gospel Book in middle Bulgarian, prepared and illustrated in 1355–1356 for Tsar Ivan Alexander of the Second Bulgarian Empire. The manuscript is regarded as one of the most important manuscripts of medieval Bulgarian culture. The manuscript, now in the British Library (Add. MS 39627), contains the text of the Four Gospels illustrated with 366 miniatures and consists of 286 parchment folios, 33 by 24.3 cm in size. Bible translations into modern Bulgarian date from the 1820s and were largely organised by Protestant missionaries. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church initially preferring the continued use of Old Church Slavonic. The Archimandrite Theodosius, abbot of the Bistritsa Monastery in Romania, translated the New Testament for the British and Foreign Bible Society, which was printed at St. Petersburg in 1823 . "It was begun by the Archimandrite Theodosius, with the sanction of Gregory, Patriarch of Constantinople. (St. Matthew's Gospel in Church Slavic and Bulgarian 1823 ) was published by the Russian Bible Society." This attempt to translate the Bible into Modern Bulgarian was characterized with poor grammatical style and was greatly influenced by the Church Slavonic version. The entire edition was sent to Saint Petersburg and is said to have been destroyed there. The BFBS had also contracted nationalist journalist Konstantin Fotinov who translated the New Testament but the BFBS did not approve it because "it was neither Slav[onic] or Bulgarian". An independent attempt to publish a Bulgarian translation of the New Testament occurred in 1828, as Petar Sapunov and his brother Father Serafim published a translation of the four gospels at the Bucharest metropolitan press in Wallachia (Romania). This translation was completed in the Eastern Bulgarian dialect. In 1835 the Bulgarian monk Neofit Rilski started a translation of the New Testament. The translation was completed on April 18, 1838. The translation was done in the dialect from the area of Gorna Dzhumaya (present day Blagoevgrad in the region of Macedonia). Here is a small sample from this translation, Matthew 2:1-2 using the modern Bulgarian orthography: 1. И като се роди Исус во Витлеем Юдейский в дните на Ирода царa, ето волсви от исток дойдоха во Иерусалим и говореха: 2.

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See also

• ▸Aftimios Ofiesh
• ▸Emblem of Uzbekistan
• ▸Church of St Nicholas, Bathampton

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.