Bilingual Edition of the Dioptra

The Dioptra is an extensive Greek didactic poem of over 7,000 verses, which was written in 1095 by a monk named Philippos. The work consists of five books. The first of these, which is also by far the shortest, forms a section in itself. In it, a monk addresses his soul and calls it to repentance and penance in view of death and the expected punishment or reward in the afterlife. The remaining four books have the form of a dialogue between flesh and soul, with the flesh answering the souls questions. Here, topics like faith and repentance, the nature of the body and the soul as well as their relationship, the coming of the Antichrist and the resurrection of the dead are dealt with. Due to its thematic diversity, the Dioptra represents a veritable contemporaneous compendium of theology, but also of natural history. This, together with the entertaining presentation as versified dialogue, obviously made the poem particularly interesting for people without a high theological education. Around the middle of the 14th century, the Dioptra was translated into Middle Bulgarian Church Slavonic. The Slavonic version is typical of this second heyday of older Bulgarian literature. It imitates the Greek original as closely as possible. At that, the language is highly standardized; the developments that the spoken language had undergone, on the other hand, appear only to a small extent. However, despite the ancient and Greek-oriented language, the content of the work was of such high interest to the Slavonic-speaking readership that it was quickly distributed and copied by hand for a long time. The popularity of the Slavonic Dioptra is evidenced by more than 200 copies written over the course of half a millennium in Bulgaria, Serbia, Moldavia and in what is now Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. While the text was initially read especially in higher social classes, even by princes, from the 17th century onwards people from the lower classes of society, craftsmen, soldiers and especially the Old Believers who had split off from the official orthodox church, became interested in the work. The object of our FWF project is the publication of the entire Slavonic text together with a Greek comparative text that corresponds as closely as possible to the original of the translation. The poem will be edited in printed and in digital form. The first volume of the print version has already been published. The digital version will be made available online, in an annotated form that can be searched by words and by grammatical categories.