Святост и изобретяване на историческа памет: култът към San Pietro Levita (De Bulgaro)
Holiness and the Invention of His-torical Memory: The Cult of St Peter Levite (De Bulgaro)

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses the cult of a local Italian saint, the blessed Peter Levite. Frequently called de Bulgaro in sources since the late sixteenth century, Peter has sometimes been ‘awarded’ Proto-Bulgarian descent by modern scholarship. The author argues that Peter’s cult developed in Vercelli (Piedmont, Northern Italy), in the tenth century, out of the historical figure of Peter, the deacon of Pope Gregory I (d. 604) and his interlocutor in Gregory’s famous Dialogues. The extant sources show that the cult started with the inventio of relics, and moreover, with their translatio to Salussola (province of Biella, Piedmont), which displays all the characteristics of a furtum sacrum. Over time, the local tradition altered the biography of Peter, linking the historical figure to the presumed ancestors of the noble family de Bulgaro (from Vercelli). From the end of the sixteenth century onwards, Peter has been celebrated as their protector. Yet, the historians who grounded their assumptions in the local tradition (a good example of a constructed, invented past and even of mythologized historical memory) have in fact turned the hagiographical legend into a historiographic one. Taking for granted the Proto-Bulgar origin of de Bulgaro family, some scholars have also attributed such descent to Peter, Pope Gregory’s collaborator, who, in fact, had no actual ties to the de Bulgaro family.

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