Saint Nicholas of Myra in the Byzantine Hymnography. Michael Zheltov (Moscow)

In his article the author presents an overview of the entire corpus of Byzantine multistrophic ecclesiastical hymns – canons and kontakia – dedicated to Saint Nicholas.

Without any doubt, for the Byzantine hymnographers Nicholas of Myra was a very important person – they wrote more hymnographic canons in his honour than in honour of any other certain saint. One can count 55 canons of Byzantine authors in honour of Saint Nicholas – not taking into account the canons, where Saint Nicholas is mentioned along with the other saints and the mixed canons from some Parakletika, where Saint Nicholas has just a troparion in each ode. Many of these 55 canons are still unedited. It is worth noting that there are three so-called garlands of canons, i. e. sets consisting of 8 canons each – one for each of the 8 musical tones (and only one of these garlands has been published, the editions of two others are in preparation, one of them – by the author of this paper).

The author analyzes the texts of the canons already edited, as well as all the accessible information about the unedited. He begins with the 9 canons (a garland plus an additional canon) by Saint Joseph the Hymnographer, showing that their traditional attribution is correct indeed (the same cannot be said about a canon recently published by V. Vasilik, which was falsely attributed to Saint Joseph by the editor) and drawing the parallels between these canons and the Constantinopolitan hagiographic tradition concerning Saint Nicholas in the times of Saint Joseph (about 816 – about 886).

Then the author proceeds with the other canons, discussing the questions of their attributions, datings and interrelationships with the changing hagiographic tradition. After the canons, he analyzes the remaining multistrophic Byzantine kontakia in honour of Saint Nicholas. There are three such multistrophic (i. e., with more than one oikos) kontakia, as well as two akathistoi.

The article is followed by a complete list of the Byzantine canons and kontakia dedicated to Saint Nicholas, a proposed timeline of their composition and, finally, by an edition of the Greek text and a Slavonic translation (made by the author of the article) of the previously unedited parakletikos canon for Saint Nicholas in 8th tone from the codex Vatic. Palat. gr. 138, 1299 (?) A.D. Fol. 303–304.