The Edition of the Serbian Verse Prolog as a Challenge

The article examines the problems posed by the edition of the Serbian translation of the Verse Prolog. On the one hand, they are due to the scarce source base available to modern scholarship: this South Slavonic version of the Byzantine Verse Synaxarion is preserved in a small number of copies which do not even cover the complete collection of texts for the annual calendar cycle and many of the months are presented in one manuscript only. On the other hand, difficulties are caused also by the lack of a critical edition of the Byzantine original – the Maurikios redaction of the Constantinople Synaxarion amended with the calendar verses by Christopher of Mytilene. The question is what kind of edition is possible for this translated text. Specific examples are discussed to demonstrate the usefulness of developing a critical apparatus which would include not only the variants in the existing Serbian copies but also comparative data from the non-critical editions of the Greek sources and even parallels from the much more widely spread Bulgarian translation of the codex.