American Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists. Ohrid 2008

Purging Greek in the Legend of Salonica: A Medieval Slavic Myth of Language

Christina Y. Bethin, ed. American Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists, Ohrid, September 2008. Vol. 1: Linguistics. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 39–57. Purging Greek in the Legend of Salonica: A Medieval Slavic Myth of Language * Daniel E. Collins 1. Introduction A century and a half after its first publication (1856), the Legend of Salonica remains enigmatic and controversial.1 The debate has centered on three issues: the date of its composition, its historicity, and the identity of its narrator. While these questions merit further discussion, they are not the focus of this article. Rather, my purpose is to offer a new interpretation of the central episode, in which a raven or, in one manuscript, a dove drops objects that enter the monk Cyril’s body, cause him to lose his linguistic competence in Greek, and give him the command of Slavonic needed to communicate with the Slavs along the Bregalnitsa River. The precise significance of this episode has yet to be appreciated. While the Legend is generally considered an apocryphal tale about the invention of the Slavonic alphabet, I argue that it is actually a tendentious myth of language shift. In this myth, Greek is presented either as superfluous matter that needs be expunged or as physical waste that needs be expelled, and Slavic is presented as a form of bread from Heaven. In other words, the Legend views Greek as carnal and Slavonic as spiritual—an outlook that puts it in the tradition of texts such as Khrabăr’s “About the Letters.” This reading hinges on a reassessment of three elements in the Legend: the associations of the raven (§3) and dove (§5) in medieval Orthodox writings (which ultimately motivate the substitution of one bird for another); the image of the Word ‘hiding’ within the believer (§3); and the meanings of the verbs used to describe Cyril’s de-acquisition of Greek in the different manuscripts (§§4, 6). * I am grateful to Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan, who introduced me to the Legend of Salonica, sought out hard-to-find references, and offered probing critiques of my ideas. I also thank M. A. Johnson of the Hilandar Research Library, Lora Taseva, and Margaret Dimitrova for their help in locating bibliographic and manuscript materials; and Thomas Butler, Anna Grotans, Predrag Matejic, Anisava Miltenova, and Svetlina Nikolova for their suggestions on an earlier version. 1 See, inter alia, Angelov 1967; Koneski 1990; Miltenova 1992, 1996; and Dobrev 2003. 40 DANIEL E. COLLINS 2. The Legend and Its Versions The Legend of Salonica is attested in four copies2 —Sofiia (Sof),3 Nikolac or Bijelo Polje (Nik),4 Tărnovo or Krivopalansko (Trn),5 and Tikvesh (Tik).6 Variously titled “[!"#]$# %&'()"* +)"#!#+*,%*%# [-$].™(),/-" 0*(1” (Tik; similarly Nik), “!"#$# %2('"*3 +)"#!#+*, %*%#, -$1() !"#$)4'! (1%51. /"&0*(1” (Sof), or simply “!"#$#, %)()"*,+)"#!#+*” (Trn), it purports to be a first-person account of a monk’s mission to the “Slavs/Bulgarians” along the Bregalnitsa, in present-day Macedonia.7 The narrator, Cyril, says that he was born in Cappadocia and studied in Damascus. One day, in the great church in Alexandria, he hears a voice telling him to go as a missionary to the land of the Slavs called Bulgarians. Though he does not know where Bulgaria is, he sets off, first to Cyprus, then to Crete, where he is told to go on to Salonica. There he visits the metropolitan John, who scolds him roundly (“6#(-0*, !1,74™ $1"7&',” Sof): “‘You stupid monk, the Bulgarians are cannibals and will eat 2 Until recently, there was assumed to be a fifth copy, Dzhinot or Konstantinov (Kon). Anisava Miltenova has concluded that the surviving nineteenth-century transcript of Kon was actually made from Tik—a possibility first raised by Ivanov (1931:281). The main differences between Tik and Kon were in the title and the number of objects in the bird’s bundle—35 in Kon as compared with 32 in Tik. Actually, Iordan Khadzhikonstantinov-Dzhinot published Kon under two different titles; the manuscript of his transcript shows that he initially wrote and then erased the number 32 (Miltenova 1996:312). 3 CIAI no. 1161, fol. 98b16–100b13, a sixteenth-century miscellany (Angelov 1967:47, 49; Stefova 1999:55; Dobrev 2003:708). 4 Monastery of Nikolac, Montenegro, no. 52 (39), fol. 185a9–186a22, a miscellany dating to the fifteenth (Pop-Atanasov 1988:115) or sixteenth century (Stefova 1999:55–56). 5 Now lost; according to its discoverer, G. Angelov, it appeared in a parchment miscellany (cited in B. Angelov 1967:46...