The Gennadius Library
“Akolouthies” Digitization Project
Daphne and Marina Heliades have donated to the Gennadius Library the corpus of printed “Akolouthies” collected by their mother, Dory Papastratou. The collection has been catalogued by Demosthenes Stratigopoulos and published as Ἔντυπες Ἀκολουθίες Ἁγίων, Συλλογὴ Ντόρης Παπαστράτου (Αθήνα 2007) under the scholarly supervision of Kriton Chryssochoidis (Research Director at the Institute for Byzantine Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation). This edition supplements that of Louis Petit, Bibliographie des acolouthies grecques [Subsidia Hagiographica 16] (Bruxelles 1926).
Dory Papastratou (1923 - 1987)
acquired the main body of her collection in June 1980 from
the collector A. A. Chatzidemos. As liturgical books, the
“Akolouthies” fitted well with her interest in the practice
Greek Orthodox worship and supplemented her important
collection of Orthodox paper icons.
The “Akolouthia”
records the religious worship that takes place in church and
aims to praise the saint on the day that his memory is being
celebrated. The printed “Akolouthies” usually have the form
of a simple pamphlet or humble booklet (hence they are
usually referred in Greek as “φυλλάδες”) and contain hymns
that are sung on the feast day of a saint or of a miraculous
event of the Church. Sometimes the “Akolouthies” also
contain longer or shorter hagiological texts (a Synaxarion
or Vita or the narration of a miraculous event).
The
Dory Papastratou collection consists of 665 “Akolouthies”
pamphlets and several books, which contain smaller or larger
compilations of “Akolouthies” dedicated to one or different
saints and to feast days with common characteristics.
Chronologically the collection spans the period from the
seventeenth century to 1981. It contains two “Akolouthies”
published in the seventeenth century, 37 “Akolouthies” of
the eighteenth century, while the rest were published in the
nineteenth and twentieth century. Of high importance are the
237 “Akolouthies” (about 1/3 of the collection) dated after
the publication of the Louis Petit’s bibliography (1926)
since they cover an important gap in the bibliography of the
“Akolouthies” production in the twentieth century.
The
665 pamphlets and miscellaneous books record the poetic
texts (mainly the canons) of the “Akolouthies” for 394 holy
persons or events: 348 saints, 7 feasts of Christ’s Festal
Cycle and 39 feasts for the Theotokos, of which 5 concern
feasts of the Virgin Festal Cycle and 34 feasts in memory of
miracles that icons of the Virgin have performed. The
collection preserves the names of 186 hymnographers,
including numerous previously unknown post-Byzantine and
modern poets. The significant production of contemporary
hymnographers revives the glorious tradition of Byzantine
poetry.
The “Akolouthies” are a unique source of
information about folk Orthodox worship during the Ottoman
period and along with the Orthodox religious engravings of
the 17th – 19th centuries that Dory Papastratou also
collected and studied, they constitute a unique testimony
for the practice of daily church service in the vernacular
language.
The donor, Daphne Heliades, wishes that the
“Akolouthies” become immediately accessible to the academic
and wider community. Under the expert guidance of
Byzantinist Kriton Chryssochoidis and the technical advice
of the IT Manager of the American School of Classical
Studies at Athens, Tarek Elemam, the “Akolouthies” are now
available to the wider community on the internet.
The
“Akolouthies” have been digitized and the material of the
2007 catalogue was used to create the database according to
the following categories:
•
saint or feast day,
• title,
• physical description,
• the Akolouthia’s writer or poet,
• year and place of
publication,
• publishing or printing house,
•
editor or copyeditor,
• sponsor of the publication,
• listing of Synaxarion texts
• bibliography
Several of the “Akolouthies” were
not digitized (either because they are under copyright or
because they are reprints of older editions that have
already been digitized); they were nevertheless entered in
the database with hyperlinks to already published
“Akolouthies” with information on additional metadata,
wherever they exist (for example, different sponsor,
different publishing/printing house, place etc).
Special
gratitude is due to Emmanuel Georgoudakis and Nikolaos
Livanos for their expert help with the digitization and the
creation of the database. Gennadius Senior Librarian, Irini
Solomonidi, Cataloguer Giannis Valourdos, and Dimitris
Velentzas have been invaluable in the accession of the
“Akolouthies” in the Library.