The Greek Gospel Lectionary Paris, BnF, grec 279 and the Georgian Monastery of Gialia in Cyprus

Abstract

The Greek Gospel lectionary housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris under the shelf mark grec 279 serves as a rare piece of a mosaic to uncover the medieval repository of a Georgian monastery at Gialia in Cyprus, which lies in ruins now. Very little is known about the manuscripts once kept within its walls, making this surviving codex an important material witness to the monastery’s manuscript heritage. The connection of this lectionary to the repository is established by a newly identified librarian’s note on the third folio of the codex. Written in Georgian nuskhuri (minuscule) script, the inscription explicitly attests that the manuscript was owned by the Monastery of the Holy Theotokos at Gialia. Furthermore, the specific phonetic shape of the monastery’s name in the text reveals Greek and Georgian pronunciation peculiarities at the turn of the second millennium. Palaeographic analysis dates the Greek codex to the ninth century. While the manuscript remained in its home monastery in Cyprus probably for a long time, its eventual fate illustrates the broader dispersion of the repository’s collection. The manuscript survived in the monastery and remained in Cyprus until the late seventeenth century, when it was acquired and transferred to France by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a French statesman under Louis XIV. By analysing this artefact, the present study opens a new perspective on the existence and ultimate fate of the ruined monastery’s once-active collection of manuscripts.