Дарението на Мелетий Софийски – факт или фикция?
The Donation of Meletii, Metropolitan of Sofia – Fact or Fiction?

Summary/Abstract: Meletii, the Metropolitan of Sofia (1832–1891), a conflicting person in his spiritual, public and political life, is constantly mentioned among the founders and first donators of the National Library. It came out that his bequest, which gave start to the manuscript collection of the Library, is wrapped in mist. Among the documents preserved in the Bulgarian Historical Archive Department, there is none to confirm the receiving and registration of Meletii’s manuscripts. However, a list of them, perhaps lost forever, has been known at a time and on this evidence Veliko Yordanov described in his history of the Library the 48 items given to it by Meletii. Strangely enough, neither Benyo Tsonev, to whom belongs the first professionally compiled catalogue of the Slavonic manuscripts in the Library, nor any of his followers tried to identify the manuscripts from the Yordanov’s list, perhaps doubting its veracity. Relying upon the number 48, confirmed in some of the sources, even though not first-hand ones, and considering the oldest catalogue numbers of these manuscripts, the author admits the reliability of the list and succeeds in identifying with great certainty eight out of twelve manuscripts (one is consisting of two fragments) in the present-day collection. Some of the most important ones are represented in brief with the awareness that their acquisition is still a hypothesis and not a proven fact.

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