International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Yulia Artamonova
Banja, Serbia; 
[e-mail]
Possible Sources of the Hilandar 
Podobia
The communication is focused on a group of manuscripts from the collection of the Hilandar 
monastery (Mt.Athon, Greece). This is a group of complete manuscripts and manuscript fragments 
that dated from the period of the 17
th
to the 19
th
century and all of them content sets of automela 
or so-called Podobia in Slavonic tradition. This group of hymnographical source is characterised 
from the point of view of chronology, codicology, a way of content arrangement. Wide range of 
both Cyrillic and Greek material is explored in order to present the Hilandar Podobia in the context 
of the Orthodox hymnography and to discover the connection between local traditions of the 
Byzantine world.
Nicolae Gheorghita
National University of Music, Bucharest, Romania; 
[e-mail]
An Encomium Dedicated to Peter the Great (1672–1725)
As his apprentice Pavlos Hieros relates, Petros Bereketis – the famed 
protopsáltis
(first cantor) 
of St Constantine at Hypsomatheia Church in Constantinople and the ”father of the Calophonic 
Heirmoi” – composed in about 1699, when he was around 33-35 years old, a remarkable encomium 
dedicated to Peter the Great and his family.

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Written in the fourth mode, following the finest tradition of the genre, the encomium is based 
on a text consisting of versets composed in the well-known 15 syllable hymnographic technique by 
sakellarios
Kyr Krallis Hiereos of the Great Church in Constantinople. Bereketis’ encomium is the 
only known monodic work dedicated to the charismatic tsar by the any 
psaltes
from Constantinople.
Besides looking at the composition from a strictly musicological perspective, the present paper 
also explores the relations between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Russian Church, 
the ecclesiastical context that determined the production of the work, as well as the liturgical 
mechanisms through which the image of Peter the Great – as a victorious Orthodox tsar – managed 
to stabilise and solidify a large part of the Eastern Church, in order to construct a pan-Orthodox 
solidarity that could simultaneously function against both Ottoman aggression and the eastward 
offensive of the Catholic Church, an offensive that was intensified once the Orthodox Church under 
Hapsburg authority entered Full Communion with Rome.