Berlinski Sbornig

Berlinski Sbornik

The influence of the Byzantines on Slavic language, culture, and religion is still apparent even today. Much of the linguistic history of this development is represented in the Berlinski Sbornik, a collected volume of texts written in Greek and Slavic addressing a wide range of issues relating to the church and theology. It is a unique manuscript because of the diverse compilation of texts, some rather mundane and others controversial, which were united into a single codex ca. 1300. Unlike the Mihanovic Homilarium, which was produced by the same workshop during the same epoch, this "collected codex" or * Sborník***, named after its abode in Berlin, combines Greek texts, genuine Slavic writings, and elementary-completive compositions with their own unique originality.
The codex was **discovered in the first half of the 19th century by the Serbian philologist Vuk Karadžić (1787–1864), probably in Bosnia or Herzegovina. In 1858, Karadžić presented it to the Prussian Royal Library in Berlin. 135 leaves are now found in the Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin under shelf mark Ms. Slav. Wuk 48, while three remaining leaves are stored in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg under shelf mark O. п. I. 15.

A Rich Assortment of Religious Texts

The total assortment of themes addressed in the Berlin Sbornikranges from canonical and apophthegmatic works of little authority to apocryphal and semi-apocryphal literature with eschatological or prognostic themes. Separately emphasized are, amongst others, the well-known struggle between body and soul; the sensory picture parabola of the blind and the lame, a hymn about Saint Paraskeue-Petka, as well as the middle-Bulgarian treatment of the Chrabr Treatise and the Constantine creation of the Slavic alphabet.
Therefore, this codex from ca. 1300 also sets a very high benchmark from a linguistic perspective even though it is incompletely preserved and possesses the same importance for the Slavic people today as it did the Byzantines and also theologians interested in the development of the canon. Among the diverse contents of the manuscript, we find the birth of Jesus and the history of Nason and his son, the story of choosing Jesus as a priest, the story of Longinus and the cycle of Emperor Avgar, and the crucified Jesus on the cross.