Textological Analyses of the Early (before the 14th century Athos corrections)
Versions of the Stichera from the Great Canon by St. Andrew of Crete Service

The present paper deals with the reconstruction of the early stages of the manuscript history
of the Slavonic translation of the Alphabetical Stichera from the Great Canon service from
the Triodion. The text was studied diachronically by the comparative textological analysis
of the variants from different text versions dating from 12th up to the 14th century. The comparison
shows that the text concerned was at least three times corrected according to the
Greek origin, resulting in 4 versions of the text as well as in numerous compilations of them.
The first Church Slavonic translation of the Stichera used in the Glagolitic tradition is preserved
in fragments in the Bulgarian manuscript of Bitola Triodion. Another early version
of the Church Slavonic translation of the text reproduced the acrostic of the origin, resulting
in the substantial alterations in the structure and the text of the hymn. The version composed
before the 11th century continued to be used for various compilations in the Bulgarian and
Serbian regions up to the 14th century, affecting all the text traditions that appeared there.
On the contrary, with the exception of the small text fragments from the Moses Kianin
Triodion, the acrostic version seems to be unknown in the East Slavic Region. The East Slavic
traditions are based on the later Preslavl version without the acrostic which is more accurate
in the representation of the structure and the text of the origin. The fragments of the version
given can be seen in the Bulgarian and Serbian compilations. The fourth version of the
Stichera existed only in the South Slavonic tradition and probably appeared during the second
stage of the Preslavl book correction. It was also proved that all translations and corrections
up to the Mount Athos book correction of the 13th–14th century were performed in the Bulgaria.
This fact explains a great variety of the text traditions in the Bulgarian scripts as opposed
to the East Slavonic and Serbian ones. The investigation shows the importance of the
separate textological study of each text of the Triodion, though they differ significantly from
the textological history of the entire collection.