The Finding of Fragments of Southern Italian Greek Manuscripts of the 13th to the 15th Centuries in the Binding of an Arabic-Latin Printed Gospel of 1591

Paper fragments of four Greek manuscripts have been discovered in the Russian National Library during the restoration of the binding of the Gospel in Arabic, with a Latin translation, published by the Medici printing house in Rome in 1591. According to my attribution, these are liturgical texts: 35 leaves from an Octoechos with Arabic notations in the margins, an edge-cut bifolium with the liturgy of St. Basil the Great, one edge-cut leaf from a Book of Hours, and a schematic drawing of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. My analysis of the paleography of the writing of these fragments allows me to conclude that all these manuscripts were created in the Greek communities of the Basilian monasteries of Southern Italy and Sicily in the 13th to the 15th centuries, and the drawing, apparently, before the middle of the 16th century. The Gospel of 1591 first belonged to the famous Russian intellectual Simeon Polotsky, then passed to the renowned copyist of the Moscow Printing Court, Priest Nikifor Semyonov, and after that it came to be found in the library of Sylvester Medvedev. This Arabic Gospel and especially the Greek fragments from the binding are unique in our archival collections representing late medieval and early modern book culture.