Der heilige Wenzel in der (alt)kirchenslavischen Hymnographie

This article features the office (akolouthia) for the Martyr Wenceslaus, Prince of Bohemia from 921 until his murder by his younger brother Boleslav (929 or 935). After a short presentation of the text, transmitted by three manuscripts of East Slavic (Novgorod) provenance dating from the late 11th to the 12th centuries, differences both at the macro- and micro-textual level, namely text structure and readings, are discussed, with particular attention to conjunctive or separative errors. The analysis of the variants and of their distribution clearly demonstrates that the three witnesses go back, independently of each other, to a common source, the lost Czech (?) origi- nal or the East Slavic archetype: therefore, they can be split into three or, more probably, two branches, with the oldest codex T opposed to the other two, Sin and Sof. In many cases, when T agrees with Sin or Sof, the original (or at least its East Slavic archetype) can be reconstructed with a reasonable degree of certainty. As the text mentions facts related to different episodes of Wenceslaus’ life, linked with his death (28th September) and the translation of his relics to Prague (4th March), it cannot be excluded that the akolouthia is the final result of a compilation of different texts of West (?) Slavic origin, which was given its actual shape on East Slavic soil. The material collected here shows the relevance of a critical approach to the whole textual tra- dition of Wenceslaus’ akolouthia, which should also consider other works from his cycle, thus enabling us to explore and disentangle cases of variation in a philological as well as linguistic perspective.