Thursday, October 24, 2013

Old Liturgical Books


In my various projects involving cleaning and rearranging at the church and the chapels, I stumbled across these two old, leather-bound liturgical books. The first one, above and below, is a November Menaion, printed in 1760. Above you can see the handwritten title page. There are other sections of the book that have been repaired. Where the pages tore, someone added parchment and hand wrote the missing sections. Our church was built in 1791, so this was probably the first Menaion they had.


Below is a smaller book, a priest's service book or Ieratikon.


Below, on the left side, you can see the date of 1842. On the right, you can see the name of the parish's long-time priest, along with a date of 1977. A year later, appears to have done some math above, where he subtracts 1842 from 1978 to come up with 136, meaning that the book was then--the year I was born--136 years old.


As a frame of reference, this part of central Greece (as well as northern Greece) was still part of the Ottoman Empire in 1842.

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