Two Rare Canons to John the Baptist

Abstract

The article presents a study and a publication of two rare canons to John the Baptist. The canon with the opening words “Plodonosen tsvetets” (“A fertile flower ”) is known in two versions. One of them is found in two fourteenth-century manuscripts located in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (Fonds 381, Nos. 114 and 116). The other survived in just one copy – a seventeenth-century manuscript in the Kirillo-Belozerskoe collection (No. 232/489) in the National Library of Russia. This version is peculiar in that it is a combination of the original troparia of this canon and the troparia borrowed from the canon “Molchanie starche” (“Elder’s silence”), which the Studite typikon assigned to the Afterfeast of the Nativity of the Forerunner. The second canon, which according to its character can be called “rejoicing”, is known from the only manuscript of a sixteenth-century psalter in the Solovetskoe collection (No. 762/872) in the National Library of Russia. It consists of common greetings – the anaphoric chairetismoi.