Programul editorial al Sfântului Antim Ivireanul, model pentru comunitățile arabe creștine din Siria și Liban

Abstract

Athanasius Dabbas, the Metropolitan of Aleppo in-between two tenures as a Patriarch of Antioch and All the East (Athanasius III, 1686-1694, 1720-1724), visited Bucharest in Wallachia in 1700-1704, looking for political protection and financial help for the Arab Christians of Ottoman Syria. He worked here together with Antim the Iberian, a hierarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church, a great scholar and skilled printer. They printed together for the first time in Arabic types, in the East, two church books with parallel text in Arabic and Greek: a Missal (1701) and a Book of Hours (1702). Dabbas received as a gift the Arabic types and other printing tools that he brought with him to Aleppo, where he kept on printing in 1705-1711. His were the first books printed in Arabic, and with Arabic types, in the realm of the Ottoman Empire, and in the Middle East in general. This paper deals with the printing program that he came to know in Wallachia and then resumed in Syria, which resulted in a model, followed by other Eastern workshops afterwards.