Authors
Sándor Földvári1; 1 Debrecen University, Hungary Discussion
In then-Hungarian Kingdom, inhabited various Slavic peoples: Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, and Transcarpathian Rusyns-Ukrainians. Two of them, Serbs and Transcarpathian-Ukrainians followed the Byzantine-rite confession. They imported their liturgical books from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. These cultural ties impacted on the Confessional identification of those Byzantine-rite enclaves lived in the sea of the Roman Catholics in the Habsburg Empire. -- There are four rarities in five copies, have been stored in the recent territory of Hungary, of “Belarusian” origin (that is, printed by Cyrillic types in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, furthermore: GDL), in chronological order: – A) an “Apostle” printed by Spiridon Sobol in Kutein, 1632 (Halenchenka, 1986: № 117); it is such rare, as no example in Belarusian collections, and even worldwide only two copies (in Russia), but the third in Hungary. – B) the “Four Gospel and Psalter” printed by the Basilian Order in Vilna (Vilnius), or Jewie (Vievis), in 1641, of which no copy is being stored in the territory of recent Belarus, therefore Halenchenka (1986: № 137) notices the “Debrecen University and National Library” (East Hungary) among the holders of this book; – C) two examples of the Supraśľ Liturgicon 1695 (Halenchenka, 1986: № 175); – D) a Psalter, printed by the Orthodox Confraternity in Mogiliov, 1738; it is such rare, as the only copy has been kept in Moscow, according to Halenchenka (1986: № 216) – but in Debrecen, East Hungary, in the Calvinist Reformed College, “due donation” (Ojtozi 1999). -- All these books have rich marginal inscriptions, about provenance and possessors as well, thus, these are significant sources of cultural history. -- With newly discovered archival sources (those were found by the author), we argue that the trade activity of the Pochaiv Monastery (in Volhynia) might have been the way of trasmitting the Belarusian books, too, because that was the center of book trade for the entire the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, too, having close connections to the Hungarian Byzantine-rite Christians as well.