К ИСТОРИИ ИСПРАВЛЕНИЯ БОГОСЛУЖЕБНЫХ КНИГ ПО ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИМ ПРИЧИНАМ

The article deals with materials related to the exclusion of expressions offensive to Muslims from liturgical books sent to Orthodox Slavs in the Balkans, and aims to introduce such materials into scholarly discourse. In order to avoid problems with Turkish customs officers, the Synod proposed to refrain from sending the Menaia and the Great Euchologion (Trebnik) to the southern Slavs and to exclude references to the Bulgarian martyr George the New from other books, as the very title of the service to this martyr refers to Yavuz Sultan Selim as 'impious king'. It is significant that the service to George the New containing extremely insulting anti-Muslim statements was composed in Russia, while Bulgaria used a different version of the same service, which was devoid of any derogatory characteristics of Muslims. The article confirms the assumption that it was primarily due to political concerns that harsh statements directed against non-believers were removed from liturgical books.