The Arabic Book of the Divine Liturgies Printed in 1745 in Iași by Patriarch Sylvester of Antioch

Abstract

The following article focuses on a printed text of the Arabic Book of the Divine Liturgies, produced in 1745 in Iași (Jassy), capital of Moldavia, by Sylvester, the Patriarch of the Greek-Orthodox Church of Antioch (1724-1766), which is comprised, together with a section of a Syriac and Arabic manuscript commentary on some Gospel passages, in MS 15 of the library of Dayr Sayyidat al-Balamand (near Tripoli, Lebanon). It is a rare copy of this early Arabic printed book, whose existence was recently established. The study encloses an outline – based on Romanian, Greek and Arabic sources – of Patriarch Sylvester’s printing activity in Iași and Bucharest in 1745-1747, a description of the Book of the Divine Liturgies (Iași, 1745) preserved in the Balamand codex, and comments on the value of this finding for future research on the printing work carried out in the Romanian Principalities, in 1701-1747, for the Arabic-speaking Christians of Ottoman Syria.