Byzantine, Post-Byzantine, Ottoman: Greek Deluxe Manuscripts in Early Modern Wallachia

In the last quarter of the 16th century and the first decades of the 17th, two major centres for the production of Greek manuscripts emerged in Wallachia. The first and more influential was established by Loukas, a Cyprus-born calligrapher who served as bishop of Buzău and later as metropolitan of Wallachia (d. 1628/9). The second was founded by Matthaios, originally from Epirus, who became abbot of Dealu Monastery and subsequently metropolitan of Myra residing in Wallachia. Together with their disciples, Loukas and Matthaios spearheaded a revival in the production of deluxe Greek liturgical manuscripts—a tradition that had ceased following the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. This revival was examined through the lens of “Byzantine persistency” and the survival of Byzantium as an idea. Loukas was often regarded as a late representative of the fourteenth- to early fifteenth-century “liturgical” style practiced at the Constantinopolitan monastery of the Mother of God Hodegetria. Occasionally, his work was also linked to the liturgical minuscule employed by Theodoros Hagiopetritis, a late thirteenth-century copyist from Thessaloniki. More recent scholarship has shifted the emphasis from continuity to processes of transformation and adaptation to new cultural contexts. Matthaios, for instance, borrowed liberally from Church Slavonic manuscripts and printed books. Nevertheless, neither the “Byzance après Byzance” paradigm nor notions such as the “Slavo-Byzantine synthesis within the framework of Byzantium after Byzantium” fully capture the complexity of this renewed interest in deluxe Greek liturgical manuscripts. This paper seeks to re-examine the surviving manuscripts produced by Loukas, Matthaios, and their disciples. By focusing on the extant colophons, I propose a new interpretive framework, situating these works within the broader context of the reconstruction of Greek-speaking Christian elites under Ottoman rule. Such an approach offers a more nuanced assessment of the significance of the so-called “Wallachian school” of Greek calligraphy.