Evergreen text and Ever-changing language: The Journey of Theodora’s Soul in Gaster 1572 from the John Rylands Library, Manchester

Written at the end of the tenth century, the Greek Vita of St Basil the Younger was continuously copied and revised up to modern times. The text has long lasting impact on the religious imagination and visual culture of the Orthodox Christian world. Various versions of the text were also translated in the Slavic milieu. The paper discusses and edits a nineteenth-century Bulgarian manuscript (Gaster 1572) from the John Rylands library, which contains only a part of the Vita -- the Journey of Theodora’s soul through the aerial tollhouses. The article explores the content of the text in the context of other post-medieval Slavonic versions, offer a palaeographical description and an analysis of its linguistic specificities. Together with other nineteenth-century Balkan renditions of the text, this copy not only demonstrate the longevity of a tenth-century eschatological–hagiographical narrative, but also exhibit trends in Balkan literary culture, which becomes both more accessible in its language and presentation to the contemporary public, and more unapologetically didactic in its message.