L'Horologion di Bessarione e il calendario in forma di canone di Gregorio Monaco

Most of the MS Venezia, BNM, gr. Z. 14 (coll. 395) was copied by the young Bessarion around 1424/1425. The codex contains the liturgical book of the Horologion, along with a vast amount of hymnographic material, mostly canons; among these, Bessarion copied the Synaxarion in the form of a hymnographic canon for feasts and commemorations of saints of the liturgical year by Gregory the Monk. This text was edited by Enrica Follieri in 1966, who however was unaware of the copy preserved in the Marcianus manuscript. Bessarion’s copy, but also the copy of Gregory’s canon preserved in the MS Berlin, Staatsbibliothek-Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Phillipps 1488 (fourteenth c.), shows a version of the text with numerous variant readings that come from a different recensio of Gregory’s canon. In these two witnesses, the most significant element is the suppression of the whole troparion dedicated to St Eugenios, the patron of Trebizond, which had led Enrica Follieri to hypothetically identify the canon’s author as Gregory Chioniades (second half of the thirteenth c.-beginning of the fourteenth c.). This article contains the collation of this new recensio with the text edited by Follieri and sketches out a possible - but still to be proved - explanation for the absence of the memory of St Eugenios in Bessarion’s work.