NEWLY DISCOVERED GLAGOLITIC FRAGMENTS FROM THE 14TH-15TH CENTURY FOUND IN THE ARCHIVES OF RIJEKA’S BENEDICTINES

Abstract

In the thus far unexplored archives of the monastery of the Benedictine nuns of St. Rochus in Rijeka, which have been located at the Monastery of St. Daniel in Abano Terme, Italy, since the exodus of Italians from lands annexed by Croatia in the aftermath of World War II, a corpus of three previously unknown fragments consisting of two fragments written in the Glagolitic script in Old Church Slavonic and one in the Latin script in Latin was discovered. These fragments were found in a book related to the management of Franjo Knežić’s endowment for the construction of the monastery. This paper analyses one of the Glagolitic fragments. The fragment, which is written in angular Glagolitic script, is
analysed from the palaeographic, codicological, theological, and liturgical-historical perspective. The transliteration of the text is provided, and it is concluded that the fragment came from a breviary from the end of the 14th or from the 15th century, and that it was related to the liturgical celebration of St. Martin, Bishop and Confessor. The discovery of the fragment is placed within the context of the liturgical-linguistic history of Rijeka, and hypotheses on the way in which it came to be in the possession of the Benedictine nuns from Rijeka, who were considered a Latin monastic community, are formed.