Apostolus Eninensis: Bibliothecae Nationalis Bulgaricae codex 1144 - Editio nova

In English with German and Russian summaries. Original text in Slavonic. Hard cover, 22x32 cm, 280 pp., ill.; net weight 950 gr. ISBN: 978-954-07-5305-8.

The Enina Apostolus was discovered in December 1960 in the village of Enina near the town of Kazanlak, a sub-Balkan town located at the southern foot of the Balkan Mountain. Only 39 folios of the manuscript were found, some of them merely fragments in extremely poor condition. In particular, the parchment of most of the folios is very dark, so that the portions of the text on them are invisible to the naked eye. After restoration, it was determined that the manuscript was in Old Church Slavonic and of Bulgarian origin, and that its content were that of a short lectionary apostolus (Acts and Epistles). The manuscript was deciphered and published in 1965 by the Bulgarian scholars Kiril Mirchev and Hristo Kodov. Their book is a model medieval manuscript edition: in addition to the reproduction of the text, it contains a description of the palaeographic features of the manuscripts, its ornamentation, graphics, orthography and language. The edition also provides an index verborum and an index of the troparia and psalter verses that appear in the manuscript's liturgical instructions. All the peculiarities of the Enina Apostolus are examined by editors against the broad background of well known Old Church Slavonis and Bulgarian Church Slavonic manuscripts.

Mirchev and Kodov extracted the maximum information available from the manuscripts. Knowing the text of the Acts and Epistles well, the added in brackets, in a number of places, text that they could not read in the manuscript, or that was missing due to damage. Unfortunately, however, there were quite a few passages that the darkened parchment did not permit them to read; in some instances the illegible portions took up a considerable part of page.

In 2017, as part of the project "The Origin of Glagolitic Old Church Slavonic Manuscripts", multi-spectral images of the Enina Apostolus were produced, and the parchment, inks and pigments of the manuscripts were chemically analysed. On the basis of the new photos, many textual passages are now visible that are missing in Mirchev and Kodov's edition, allowing some of their assumptions about illegible portions to be either confirmed of corrected. The present edition was prepared on the basis of those specialized photographs and contains studies of features of the manuscript the were not included in Mirchev and Kodov's edition: i.e. the textology, the calendar and the liturgical instructions (rubrics) for the great feasts.