Demetrius of Sinai (? – around 1075)
The history of diplomacy is nothing but the history of international consciousness. Textual awareness is here in the first place, not because it gives birth to fairy tales and poems, essays and polished sonnets, beautifies the life of the bourgeois with fiction and makes life bitter with satire, but because literature is the main traffic on the semiotic highways of this world. A file of the most important creative and metaphysical problems in ancient and European culture. A good cop without a baton.
The history of international relations does not reach these areas of ours, which did not spontaneously sprout or fall from the sky, but are pure Greco-Latin chemistry, from anywhere except directly from the text. Its nature can only be recognized and revealed through the text. Diplomacy, as well as diplomacy (the science that studies letters, diplomas, charters, contracts and official documents between negotiating subjects) does not exist outside the text, nor is its disjunction from the text possible. Interstate diplomatic relations are realized only through oral or written genres.
We consider our tradition in the format of some thousand years, in the light of which diplomacy at the beginning has a written character, until halfway through our history (up to the Crnojevic era around 1500), and then significantly oral (spoken) through the epic and the crisis of Church Slavonic language, and, finally, again the written character in the modern age. Modernity coincides with the mass enjoyment of the Latin alphabet, if Radovan Samardžić is to be believed, that the Slovenian corpus, for the first time with full force, entered the western cultural stage only in the eighteenth century. Be that as it may, the alternating predominance of oral and written genres sets the tone for diplomatic action and awareness on the soil of today's Montenegro.
This big, long story begins with Cyrillic literacy and literature. Our consciousness begins with a distant ancestor, to put it poetically, whom we can comfortably call the father of the written word on the soil of Montenegro, Dimitrije Sinajit, writer and church diplomat from the 11th century. We know for certain that he left Duklja after the schism in 1054, in any case for church and literary work, and left for the big world, for the Holy Land. His last trace, the Psalter of Demetrius of Sinai, can be found on Mount Sinai (St. Catherine's monastery, today's Egypt). At that time, he was literary, that is, church-diplomatic active and seemed to be at the peak of his strength. Western Slavists assume that he worked for another quarter of a century (around 1075).
Secret writer
Dimitrije is a long and addictively attractive secret. He is the compiler of the world's best poetry, the psalms of King David (as a translator, he is separated by two millennia from the translated emperor-poet, and one millennium from us). He has been known for more than a century and a half, at least the basic things that make him a world-class writer of his time. First, that he is a copyist of holy books with a strong personal stamp, visible by the urge to step out of dogmatics with a minor personal expression. Second, that he is a church worker and a canonical diplomat in the zone of inter-church and international communication. Finally, thirdly, that he was attracted to the monumental literary commonwealth of Byzantium, Greek-Latin chemistry, where fate brought him to the wide stage.
It is our deepest secret that makes it top of the list: language. The influence of the Latin language on Dimitri's Church Slavonic. That's where the fame lies. Language is a miracle that enters you by a miracle, comrade and sir! The musical homeland, the fluid that weaves into the mother's soft breath, the harmony of the physical and spiritual being, the fury of living souls. If you knew in what language the Lord God speaks, sir my friend, you would know who God is!
Scientists have proven that our Demetrius Sinaiticus - I will use the writer's Latinized name - could have experienced the Latin language familiarly only on the coast, which for the 11th century administratively means only in Duklja. The influence is evident in the original Old Slavic discourse.
The title of the 272-page work has a Latin form: Psalterium Demetrii Sinaitici, and the appendix, something personal to the author, the book of medical imputations, which in Serbo-Croatian is nicely called ljekaruša, is also domesticated in science in Latin (Adiectis foliis medicinalibus). Dimitrije also has his own brand in the hidden alley of world comparative studies: "PsDem". The apothecary, composed of two leaves and attached to the main work, the Psalter, is marked with "MedBl".
Writers know what it means to kiss the hand of a foreign language and call this hand lover influence. I've done it five times in my life, and I'm still not sure I'm a writer by trade. When I am overcome by despondency and aversion to literature, I at least have some consolation, besides a drop of whiskey, I enjoy the dialogue (according to our double entendre) of Lope de Vega, a funny passage by Cervantes or a sonnet by Francisco de Quevedo, spelling it in the original as if I were diluting aspirin for a headache . The offspring and guardian of her language, JL Borges, in the hour of despondency has nothing to do but kiss the hand of German:
"The melodious speeches of Germany, you are your own masterpiece!"
Successive discoveries
Dimitrija was first discovered exactly 170 years ago by the Russian writer and theologian, Bishop Porfirije Uspenski, Mr. 1850 (the one who tore out the page of our Miroslav's Gospel and took it from Hilandar to Petersburg in 1845), but it was considered in the profession for a long time, a century and a half, that he was a native of Bulgarian regions and from there moved to the Holy Land, and the author and manuscript were called in Bulgarian.
At the end of the golden age of the best classical philology in the world, German, a study was published in Leipzig that labels the author and the work "Old Bulgarian" (Bernd von Arnim: Studiem zum altbulgarischen Psalterium Sinaiticum, Leipzig, Markert & Petters, 1930). After eight hundred years of solitude, Dimitrije arrived at the Charles University in Prague, where he was mentioned by Josef Weiss (1932), and since then Czech polyhistorians Antonín Dostál (1959), František Václav Mareš (1979) and others have dealt with him.
Today, scientists generally agree that the year 1975 can be considered a complete discovery, but even there is no end to doubts, since the main book on Cyrillic manuscripts: Glagolitische und Kirilische Handschriften in Österreich, published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1975, does not mention it. Here it is in my hands, I bought a worn copy for 40 euros a couple of years ago in Vienna, while I was filming the movie Kotor Missal, but of all the Sinaiites, only a certain Ammonius of Canopus (Sinaitische Mönche) is mentioned here. Not a word about poor Dimitri. The author Gerhard Birkfellner, of course, since the work is dedicated to the Vuk era, is not obliged to reach back into the past, as they say to Kulina-ban, but it is striking that in this excellent book of 550 pages, Dimitrije Sinajit, practically the world's first Slavic writer after Ćiril and Methodija, does not have its own corner.
We find Dimitrije in the desert after nine hundred years of solitude. "A sensational discovery in the monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai in 1975. not only raised a considerable number of new, important sources, but also many questions about the development of manuscripts, about the origin of their writers (curs. GČ), and finally about the monastery as an international center of Christianity and culture" (see: Preliminary Remarks on the Old Church Slavonik Psalterium Demetrii Sinaitics, a work signed by the famous Austrian Slavist Heinz Miklas and collaborators Melanie Gau and Danna Hürner).
Namely, the manuscript as a whole first saw the light of Mr. 1975 in Thessaloniki and it was published by the Greek paleographer Ioannis Tarnanidis (The Slavonic Manuscripts Discovered in 1975 at. St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai, Thessaloniki 1988) with the scientifically coded mark Si. Slav 3/N. "The fairly well-preserved manuscript contains biblical songs and several liturgical contributions," say the editors of the latest Vienna version from 2012, "but the codex also contains some additional documents from two writers: the basis or prayer cycle, based on the Greek-Latin Glagolitic alphabet and remarks with a small Latin alphabet written by the hand of an anonymous contemporary, apparently at Dimitrije's request", adds Heinz Miklas.
Calling Dimitri a key figure of the Sinaitic tradition, an outstanding writer, which he really was (we, comparatists, willy-nilly have to call him a world writer, even though he is minor in scope, because he is an actor of the world cultural scene, of the Greek-Latin commonwealth, and not ethnographic cheerful provincial), Miklas concludes in medias res:
"Some content and linguistic peculiarities indicate that this excellent writer does not come from the Eastern Balkans, as was previously assumed, but from Duklja/Zeta and that he most likely moved to the Holy Land for ecclesiastical and political reasons." The linguistic point of view is strengthened by the fact that all three assistants, one correspondent of the ljekaruša codex (copyist) and two proofreaders dominate the Cyrillic discourse and thereby confirm the assumption of the "Western Balkan origin" of the author.
Since its publication in the catalog of Tarnanidis, Lekaruša has attracted attention with its "unusual genre and language" and has shifted its focus to philology. Finally, after a century and a half of doubts, a meticulous German woman will prove that the Chronicle of Pope Dukljanin, i.e. Dukljanin from Krajina, so far considered our oldest writer (lived before 1172), has a hundred years older predecessor and forerunner - native and countryman, Dimitrije Sinajit.
Coastal flu
The historian of medicine Ursula Rosenschon put an end to the doubts about the origin of the writers by discovering the influence of the Latin language in the twenty-two recipes of Demetrius for practical medicine, and in the entire codex, which is obligatory not only for the Sinai monastic brotherhood but also for the entire area (Seichs Seiten medizinische Recepte im glagolitischen Psalter 3 /N des Sinaiklosters, ed. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1993, pp. 129-159).
Linguistic peculiarities and the names of plants and medicinal plants point undoubtedly to the Balkan coastal south, and codicological and paleographical analysis confirm that Dimitrije lived and worked in an area with a strong Latin tradition, which could only be the present-day Montenegrin coast and not the Balkan interior. Hence, Miklas and his collaborators, the Austrian Slavists Fabian Hollaus and Martin Lettner draw a conclusion about the Dukljan-Zeta base of Dimitrije Sinajit (Details of content and language indicate that this interesting writer did not come from the Eastern Balkans, as was first supposed, but form Diocleia/ Zeta, and that he moved to the Holly Land apparently for reasons of church politics).
Dimitrije lived and worked in exile in the most important cultural micro-location of his time, where Moses had an equal conversation with God, at the edge of the unburnable blackberry bush, where today his minor achievement is kept, in which he ignited the Slovenian-Latman dialect of his old end (perhaps Kotor?). He, among the first, if not the first, in one script, Glagolitic, practically in one language, transcribes and compiles (which means he also translates) the poetry of King David and the books of the Bible.
He also separates himself from the others with his literary technique. The German scientist Ursula Rosenschon was at the international Byzantological Congress in 1991. announced in Moscow that Dimitrije used the palimpsest technique, an old manuscript on which a new one is written over the erased text (see: Ein medizinisches Fragment unter den slavischen Handschriftenfunden des Sinai, vol. II, pp. 961-63).
He wrote his Ljekarusha, and copied (translated) the Psalms on parchment, written with some Latin text, then erased, inserting here and there a native stamp and tone (this distinguishes him from the army of schematic copyists), and then embellished the Glagolitic script according to the Greek script. The Austrians used ultraviolent and multispectral rays with the latest recording technology and confirmed the palimpsest technique of the writer and canonical diplomat from Duklja. (The technique of relations between texts, Russian formalists and Czech structuralists, my teachers, will call, a thousand years later, the term intertextuality).
Who is our oldest writer and diplomat Dimitrije Sinajit?
I see Dimitri, or I want to see him, in the African desert, hovering over a manuscript, straining his aged vision, strained by the trials of international literacy, to unravel the contradictory idioms of Greek idioms.
I see him reading in the canonical light the diplomatic epistles of the emperor and contemporary Constantine Monomachus (980-1055), shaking his head, if my intuition is not deceiving me, if my instinct is not deceiving me, at the plots and affairs of the emperor's influential mistress and cousin Maria Skleraine.
I see him swimming in three world languages and reading his forerunners: the Syrian Byzantine writer Evargius Scholastic (536-594), the mystic Maximus the Confessor (581-662), and the father of English literature Bedus the Venerable (672-735), who fall into his hands in a Latin or Greek manuscript in the Sinaitic library, the richest after the Alexandrian one in the ancient world.
And I see him, whether it was a trick or not, recalling the face of a girl from his youth as he hugs her in the old neighborhood, both of them whispering two-syllables in a coastal dialect (if Kotor is not my heretical hypothesis). He left her because of damned science, or she left him for the same reason, which is equally grasping, so he gives her some gentle native name to distinguish her in the fog of memories from the oriental stranger in the Levant...
Bonus video:
