Introduction

Slavonic ecclesiastical culture is a classic example of the cultural transmission between two societies, namely the Byzantine Greeks and the Slavs. This phenomenon was especially pronounced in the early period of Slavonic Christianity after the Slavs had embraced the new religion from Greek missionaries in the ninth century. According to the custom of the Byzantine Rite, the newly baptized Slavs could hold church services in their own native language; as a result, a great many texts essential for daily, weekly and yearly cycles of worship were translated into Church Slavonic and thus transmitted from Byzantium into Slavonic lands. Hymnographic texts constituted a substantial share in this cultural transmission. The following chapter will examine a particular type of liturgical collection of hymns used in Byzantine and Slavonic rites between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries, which contains a collection of kontakia. However, before discussing kontakia and their collections, it is helpful to provide a short historical introduction to this hymnographic genre and define some technical terms.

The kontakion is one of the most important genres of Byzantine hymnography. It began to flourish in the beginning of the sixth century with the work of Romanos the Melode (died after 555). Initially, it was an extended hymn, consisting of up to forty stanzas that all were structurally alike and often linked with an acrostic, that is, a word or phrase formed out of first letters of the poem.