Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

Finally, a point of interest for both historians and anthropologists is the reference in the “Chronicle” to the beliefs of the monks at Snagov vis-à-vis their visions in the church there. They could not agree about what had transpired with Vlad III’s corpse during their vigil for him, and they named several of the methods traditionally cited as the basis for the transformation of a corpse into the living dead-a vampire-indicating a general belief among them that he was at risk of such an outcome. Some of them believed they had seen an animal jumping over the corpse and others that a supernatural force in the form of fog or wind had entered the church and caused the body to sit up. The case of an animal is widely documented in Balkan folklore about vampire genesis, as is the belief that vampires can turn into fog or mist. Vlad III’s notorious bloodletting, and his conversion to Catholicism in the household of the Hungarian king Mátyás Corvinus, would probably have been known to the monks, the former since it was common knowledge in Wallachia and the latter because it must have been a concern in the Orthodox community there (and particularly in Vlad’s favored monastery, where the abbot was probably his confessor).

The Manuscripts

The “Chronicle” of Zacharias is known through two manuscripts,Athos 1480 andR.VII.132; the latter is also referred to as the “Patriarchal Version.”Athos 1480, a quarto manuscript in a single semiuncial hand, is housed in the library at Rila Monastery in Bulgaria, where it was discovered in 1923. This, the earlier of the two versions of the “Chronicle,” was almost certainly penned by Zacharias himself at Zographou, probably from notes made at Stefan’s deathbed. Despite his claim that he “took down every word,” Zacharias must have made this copy after considerable composition; it reflects a polish he could not have achieved on the spot, and contains only one correction. This original manuscript was probably housed in the Zographou library until at least 1814, since it is mentioned by title in a bibliography of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts at Zographou dating from that year. It resurfaced in Bulgaria in 1923, when the Bulgarian historian Atanas Angelov discovered it hidden in the cover of an eighteenth-century folio treatise on the life of Saint George(Georgi 1364.21) in the library at Rila Monastery. Angelov ascertained in 1924 that no copy was extant at Zographou. It is unclear exactly when or how this original made its way from Athos to Rila, although the threat of pirate raids on Athos during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may have played a part in its removal (and that of numerous other precious documents and artifacts) from the Holy Mountain.

The second and only other known copy or version of the Zacharias “Chronicle”-R.VII.132or the “Patriarchal Version”-is housed at the library of the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople and has been paleographically dated to the mid- or late sixteenth century. It is probably a later version of a copy sent to the patriarch by the abbot of Zographou in Zacharias’s time. The original of this version presumably accompanied a letter from the abbot to the patriarch, alerting the patriarch to the possibility of a heresy in the Bulgarian monastery Sveti Georgi. The letter is no longer extant, but it is probable that for reasons of efficiency and discretion the abbot of Zographou requested Zacharias to recopy his chronicle for delivery to Constantinople, keeping the original for the Zographou library. Between fifty and a hundred years after its receipt, the “Chronicle” was still considered important enough to the patriarchal library to be preserved by recopying.

The “Patriarchal Version,” in addition to being a probable later copy of a missive from Zographou, differs fromAthos 1480 in another important way: it eliminates part of the story of what the monks in the vigil at the church of Snagov claimed to have witnessed there, namely from the line “One monk saw an animal” to the line “the headless body of the prince stirred and tried to rise.” This passage may have been eliminated in the later copy in an attempt to keep users of the patriarchal library from unnecessary exposure to information about the heresy described by Stefan, or perhaps to minimize their exposure to superstitions about the origins of the walking dead, a set of beliefs the church administration generally opposed. The “Patriarchal Version” is difficult to date, although it is almost certainly the copy listed in a Patriarchal library catalog from 1605.

A final similarity-a striking and perplexing one-exists between the two extant manuscripts of the “Chronicle.” Both were torn off by hand at more or less the same point in the story.Athos 1480 ends with “I learned,” while the “Patriarchal Version” continues “that it was no ordinary plague, but instead,” each having been neatly sundered after a complete line, presumably removing the part of Stefan’s tale that gave evidence of a possible heresy or other evil at the monastery of Sveti Georgi.

A clue to the dating of this damage may be found in the library catalog mentioned above, which lists the “Patriarchal Version” as “incomplete.” We can therefore assume that the end of this version was torn off before 1605. There is no way to know, however, whether the two acts of vandalism occurred during the same period, or whether one inspired the other in a much later reader, or how similar the two endings of the document actually were. The fidelity of the “Patriarchal Version” to the Zographou manuscript, with the exception of the vigil passage noted above, indicates that the story probably ended identically or at least very similarly in the two versions. Furthermore, the fact that the “Patriarchal Version” was torn off despite its elimination of the passage about the supernatural events in the church at Snagov supports the idea that it still concluded with a description of heresy or evil at Sveti Georgi. There is to date no other example, among medieval Balkan manuscripts, of systematic tampering with two copies of the same document hundreds of miles distant from each other.

Editions and Translations

The “Chronicle” of Zacharias of Zographou has been published twice before. The first edition of it was a Greek translation with limited commentary included in Xanthos Constantinos’sHistory of the Byzantine Churches, 1849. In 1931 the Oecumenical Patriarchate printed a pamphlet of it in the original Slavonic. Atanas Angelov, who discovered the Zographou version in 1923, planned to publish it with extensive commentary but was prevented from fulfilling this project by his death in 1924. Some of his notes were published posthumously inBalkanski istoricheski pregled in 1927.

The “Chronicle” of Zacharias of Zographou

This tale was told to me, Zacharias the penitent, by my Brother in Christ, Stefan the Wanderer fromTsarigrad. He came to our monastery of Zographou in the year 6987 [1479]. Here he related to us the strange and wonderful events of his life. Stefan the Wanderer was fifty-three years of age when he arrived among us, a wise and pious man who had seen many countries. Thanks be to the Holy Mother who guided him to us from Bulgaria, whence he had wandered with a company of monks from Wallachia and endured many sufferings at the hands of the infidel Turk and seen two of his friends martyred in the town of Haskovo. He and his brothers carried with them through the infidel lands some relics of marvelous power. With these relics they made a procession deep into the country of the Bulgarians and were famous throughout the countryside, so that Christian men and women came out along all the roadsides as the procession passed them, to bow to them or kiss the sides of the wagon. And these holy relics were taken thus to the monastery called Sveti Georgi and there enshrined. So that although the monastery was a small and quiet place many pilgrims came to it thereafter on their way from the monasteries at Rila and Bachkovo or from holy Athos. But Stefan the Wanderer was the first we knew here who had been in Sveti Georgi.