Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

“He started, staring at me. ‘I would like to see this book when that is possible,’ he said.

“But the point that seemed to pique his interest even more was Turgut and Selim’s discovery that the abbot to whom Brother Kiril’s letters were addressed had presided over the monastery at Snagov in Wallachia. ‘Snagov,’ he said in a whisper. His old face had flushed crimson and I wondered for a moment if he was going to faint. ‘I should have known this. And I have had that letter in my library for thirty years!’

“I hoped I would have the chance to ask him, too, where he’d found his letter. ‘You see, there is fairly good evidence that the monks of Brother Kiril’s party traveled from Wallachia to Constantinople before coming to Bulgaria,’ I said.

“‘Yes.’ He shook his head. ‘I have always thought it described a journey of monks from Constantinople, on pilgrimage in Bulgaria. I never realized-Maxim Eupraxius-the abbot of Snagov -’ He seemed almost overcome with swift ruminations, which flashed across his mobile old face like a windstorm and made him blink his eyes rapidly. ‘And this wordIvireanu that you found, and also Mr. Hugh James, in Budapest -’

“‘Do you know what it means?’ I asked eagerly.

“‘Yes, yes, my son.’ Stoichev seemed to be looking through me without seeing. ‘It is the name of Antim Ivireanu, a scholar and printer at Snagov at the end of the seventeenth century-long after Vlad Tepes. I have read about Ivireanu’s work. He made a great name among the scholars of his time and he attracted many illustrious visitors to Snagov. He printed the holy gospels in Romanian and Arabic, and his press was the first one in Romania, in all probability. But-my God-perhaps it was not the first, if the dragon books are much older. There is a great deal I must show you!’ He shook his head, wide-eyed. ‘Let us go into my rooms, quickly.’

“Helen and I glanced around. ‘Ranov is busy with Irina,’ I said in a low voice.

“‘Yes.’ Stoichev got to his feet. ‘We will go in this door at the side of the house. Hurry, please.’

“We needed no urging. The look on his face alone would have been enough to make me follow him up a cliff. He struggled up the stairs and we went slowly after him. At the big table he sat down to rest. I noticed it was scattered with books and manuscripts that hadn’t been there the day before. ‘I have never had very much information about that letter, or the others,’ Stoichev said when he’d caught his breath.

“‘The others?’ Helen sat down beside him.

“‘Yes. There are two more letters from Brother Kiril-with mine and the one in Istanbul, that is four. We must go to Rila Monastery immediately to see the others. This is an incredible discovery, to reunite them. But that is not what I must show you. I never made any connection -’ Again he seemed too stunned to speak for long.

“After a moment, he went into one of the other rooms and came back carrying a paper-covered volume, which proved to be an old scholarly journal printed in German. ‘I had a friend -’ he stopped. ‘If only he had lived to see this day! I told you-his name was Atanas Angelov-yes, he was a Bulgarian historian and one of my first teachers. In 1923 he was doing some researches in the library at Rila, which is one of our great treasure-houses of medieval documents. He found there a manuscript from the fifteenth century-it was hidden inside the wooden cover of an eighteenth-century folio. This manuscript he wanted to publish-it is the chronicle of a journey from Wallachia to Bulgaria. He died while he was making notes on it, and I finished them and published it. The manuscript is still at Rila-and I never knew -’ He smote his head with his frail hand. ‘Here, quickly. It is published in Bulgarian, but we will look through it and I will tell you the most important points.’

“He opened the faded journal with a hand that trembled, and his voice trembled, too, as he picked out for us an outline of Angelov’s discovery. The article that he had written from Angelov’s notes, and the document itself, have since been published in English, with many updates and with endless footnotes. But even now I can’t look at the published version without seeing Stoichev’s aging face, the wispy hair falling over protuberant ears, the great eyes bent to the page with burning concentration, and above all his halting voice.”

The “Chronicle” of Zacharias of Zographou

By Atanas Angelov and Anton Stoichev

INTRODUCTION

Zacharias’s “Chronicle” as a Historical Document

Despite its famously frustrating incompleteness, the Zacharias “Chronicle,” with the embedded “Tale of Stefan the Wanderer,” is an important source of confirmation of Christian pilgrimage routes in the fifteenth-century Balkans, as well as information about the fate of the body of Vlad III “Tepes” of Wallachia, long believed to have been buried at the monastery on Lake Snagov (in present-day Romania). It also provides us with a rare account of Wallachian neomartyrs (although we cannot know for certain the national origins of the monks from Snagov, with the exception of Stefan, the subject of the “Chronicle”). Only seven other neomartyrs of Wallachian origin are recorded, and none of these is known to have been martyred in Bulgaria.

The untitled “Chronicle,” as it has come to be called, was written in Slavonic in 1479 or 1480 by a monk named Zacharias at the Bulgarian monastery on Mount Athos, Zographou. Zographou, “the monastery of the painter,” originally founded in the tenth century and acquired by the Bulgarian church in the 1220s, is located near the center of the Athonite peninsula. As with the Serbian monastery Hilandar, and the Russian Panteleimon, the population of Zographou was not limited to its sponsoring nationality; this and the lack of any other information about Zacharias make it impossible to determine his origins: he could have been Bulgarian, Serbian, Russian, or perhaps Greek, although the fact that he wrote in Slavonic argues for a Slavic origin. The “Chronicle” tells us only that he was born sometime in the fifteenth century and that his skills were held in esteem by Zographou’s abbot, since the abbot chose him to hear the confession of Stefan the Wanderer in person and record it for an important bureaucratic and perhaps theological purpose.

The travel routes mentioned by Stefan in his tale correspond to several well-known pilgrimage routes. Constantinople was the ultimate destination for Wallachian pilgrims, as it was for all of the eastern Christian world. Wallachia, and particularly the monastery of Snagov, was also a pilgrimage site, and it was not unknown for the route of a pilgrim to touch both Snagov and Athos at its extremes. That the monks passed through Haskovo on their way to the Bachkovo region indicates that they probably took a land route from Constantinople, traveling through Edirne (present-day Turkey) into southeastern Bulgaria; the usual ports on the Black Sea coast would have put them too far north for a stop in Haskovo.

The appearance of traditional pilgrimage destinations in Zacharias’s “Chronicle” raises the question of whether Stefan’s tale is a pilgrimage document. However, the two purported reasons for Stefan’s wanderings-exile from the fallen city of Constantinople after 1453 and the transport of relics and search for a “treasure” in Bulgaria after 1476-make this at least a variation on the classic pilgrim’s chronicle. Furthermore, only Stefan’s departure from Constantinople as a young monk seems to have been motivated primarily by the desire to seek out holy sites abroad.

A second topic on which the “Chronicle” sheds light is the final days of Vlad III of Wallachia (1428?-76), popularly known as Vlad Tepes-the Impaler-or Dracula. Although several historians who were his contemporaries give descriptions of his campaigns against the Ottomans and his struggles to capture and retain the Wallachian throne, none address in detail the matter of his death and burial. Vlad III made generous contributions to the monastery at Snagov, as Stefan’s tale asserts, rebuilding its church. It is likely that he also requested burial there, in keeping with the tradition of founders of and major donors to foundations throughout the Orthodox world.