Metaphrastic Hagiography in the South Slavonic Context

While the translations of Metaphrastic hagiography from the 13th and 14th century in South Slavic Europe slowly gains more academic interest from the broader socio-cultural perspective, there are still many questions that arise, when confronted with this literary corpus. First, there is as of yet no systematic approach towards their literary and linguistic characteristics and unique features, nor to their positioning within the translations in general of the above mentioned chronological and geographical setting. Second, the current state-of-the-art of ‘proven’ influence of Metaphrastic translations on later hagiographic writings, and vice versa, still leaves a lot to our imagination. So far only small-scale connections have been made between two Metaphrastic works and later works attributed to Bulgarian men of letters patriarch of Tarnovo Euthymius and Gregory Tsamblak. Our paper focuses on several Metaphrastic hagiographic texts in their Slavonic translations, aiming to trace and identify the translation principles and literary models of selected vitae from the September volume – the only volume completely rendered in Slavic.