Synodikon of Tsar Boril

The Synodikon opens not as a book to be read but as a service to be performed. The rubric sets it on the first Sunday of Great Lent — the Sunday of Orthodoxy — when the whole text was chanted aloud in the patriarchal church of Tarnovo before the assembled court and clergy. Everything that follows is shaped by that: the anathemas are sentences pronounced, the commemorations are names called out, and the acclamations are sung to a living tsar standing in the church.

By far the longest run of the document, and the least Bulgarian: a translation of the Byzantine Synodikon of Orthodoxy, taken over more or less whole. It condemns the iconoclasts first, then works back through the old christological heresies — Arius, Nestorius, Eutyches, Severus — and forward into the Constantinopolitan disputes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, John Italos and his pupils among them. Each condemnation ends in the same word, repeated three times.

Here the document stops being a translation and becomes a Bulgarian one. Tsar Boril convened a council in Tarnovo in February 1211, and its record was written into the Synodikon at the point where the borrowed anathemas leave off: the tsar presiding, the clergy assembled, the Bogomils summoned, questioned and condemned. It is the reason the whole compilation carries Boril's name, and it is the single fullest Bulgarian account of the heresy from inside Bulgaria. The passage reaches back to the movement's beginning under Tsar Peter, and turns the founder's name against him in a pun that has followed him ever since.

The second Bulgarian insertion, and the one with the most riding on it. After Klokotnitsa the Bulgarian church needed its rank recognised, and the Synodikon copies out the correspondence that secured it — the letter of the Greek emperor to the eastern patriarchs asking that Tarnovo be granted a dignity equal to their own. The passage is why the church of the Ascension in Tarnovo could call itself the mother church of the Bulgarian tsardom, and it records Ivan Asen II being addressed by Constantinople as an equal and a kinsman.

The section the Synodikon is actually consulted for. The rulers of Bulgaria are called out in order, each with his title and the formula of remembrance: Boris-Michael who received the baptism, Symeon, Peter, Samuel, then the long gap of Byzantine rule, then Peter and Asen who ended it, Kaloyan, Ivan Asen II, and on down through the Asenids to the Shishmanids. The list was extended by later hands as later tsars died, which is why it is also a rough chronology of the dynasty.

The same formula in the feminine, and the most valuable few lines in the entire document. Medieval Bulgarian narrative sources barely name the women of the ruling house; charters name them only when they happen to be co-issuing. This list names them outright, with their rank and their kinship — which wife, whose mother, whose daughter. Kera Petritsa is known to be Ivan Alexander's mother because this list says so.

Not a single succession but seven of them, one per see — Preslav, Cherven, Lovech, Sredets, Ovech, Dristra, Serres — each a bare column of names in order. Dry as it looks, this is the closest thing we have to an administrative map of the Bulgarian church: it shows which cities held metropolitan rank and roughly how deep each succession ran. A line after the Dristra list states the point of the whole exercise, that these men stood under the patriarchate of Tarnovo in the days of tsar Asen — a claim of jurisdiction, entered into the liturgy so it would be read aloud every year.

Below the throne: court officers, provincial commanders and boyars, most of them named nowhere else. The titles are as revealing as the names — epikernios, protosebastos, protokeliot, primikyrios, voivode — a working index of what the Tarnovo court actually had in it. Several entries give a man his monastic name alongside his lay one, the sign of a career that ended in a cell. The first two entries are in a different hand and mention a voivode of Wallachia who lived in the sixteenth century: the book was still being written in long after the state that began it had gone.

The Synodikon went on being written in, and the last Bulgarian layer is the bleakest. Under Ivan Alexander two further councils had been entered — one condemning Barlaam and Akindynos, which puts Bulgaria on the hesychast side of the great Byzantine quarrel of the 1340s, and the council of 1360 in Tarnovo against the Judaizers. What comes after them is not doctrine but casualties: men commemorated for having fought the Turks and died doing it, followed by a bare column of names with no titles at all. Then the neighbours appear — Serbian kings, a despot killed at the Maritsa, Moldavian lords — the commemoration widening as Bulgaria itself contracts.

A synodikon of the Byzantine type normally closes by turning from the dead to the living, acclaiming the reigning tsar and patriarch standing in the church. This one does not — or rather, we cannot know whether it did. The Palauzov copy breaks off in the middle of an anathema against those who trample icons, practise sorcery, revile the clergy and defile churches, the leaf damaged so badly that Popruzhenko could only mark the gaps with dots. The last word to survive intact is the sentence itself, written larger than anything around it: ANATHEMA. It is an accident of preservation rather than a design, but it is how the document reaches us — a book of remembrance whose final legible word is a curse.