Ioana Feodorov - Böcker

Arabic printing began in Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Levant through the association of the scholar and printer Antim the Iberian, later a metropolitan of Wallachia, and Athanasios III Dabbās, twice patriarch of Antioch, when the latter, as metropolitan of Aleppo, was sojourning in Bucharest. This partnership resulted in the first Greek and Arabic editions of the Book of the Divine Liturgies (Snagov, 1701) and the Horologion (Bucharest, 1702). With the tools and expertise that he acquired in Wallachia, Dabbās established in Aleppo in 1705 the first Arabic-type press in the Ottoman Empire. After the Church of Antioch divided into separate Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic Patriarchates in 1724, a new press was opened for Arabic-speaking Greek Catholics by ʻAbdallāh Zāḫir in Ḫinšāra (Ḍūr al-Šuwayr), Lebanon. Likewise, in 1752-1753, a press active at the Church of Saint George in Beirut printed Orthodox books that preserved elements of the Aleppo editions and were reprinted for decades. This book tells the story of the first Arabic-type presses in the Ottoman Empire which provided church books to the Arabic-speaking Christians, irrespective of their confession, through the efforts of ecclesiastical leaders such as the patriarchs Silvester of Antioch and Sofronios II of Constantinople and financial support from East European rulers like prince Constantin Brâncoveanu and hetman Ivan Mazepa.

This edited volume collects the proceedings of the second of two conferences organized by the Typarabic project. It presents the research results of the project, with a focus in this second volume on decorative features of Christian Arabic manuscripts from the 18th century.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 4th TYPARABIC Conference, held in Venice between May 27–29, 2025, together with a selection of additional studies on the religious and intellectual history of Arabic-speaking communities in the Ottoman Levant, resulting from earlier team’s conferences. It documents a significant moment of scholarly exchange, while offering a varied contribution to the study of Arabic print culture and Church history. The conference papers concentrate on the Italian connection in the development of Arabic printing in 18th-century Europe and the Near East. They analyze the technical, commercial, and ecclesiastical networks that linked Italian printing centers – above all Venice – with Levantine and Eastern European presses, emphasizing the circulation of type, texts, and craftsmen. The additional contributions expand the thematic scope of the volume by addressing theological debates and cultural interactions within Arabic-speaking Christianity. Through focused case studies, they place Eastern Christians within the wider Ottoman and Mediterranean contexts, highlighting patterns of exchange, adaptation, and intellectual continuity. Taken together, the essays provide a coherent and methodologically rigorous account of the dialogue between print, theology, and cross-cultural connections in the 18th-century Ottoman Levant.

This is a thoroughly revised and expanded version of the first edition of the Arabic version of Dimitrie Cantemir’s The Divan or the Sage’s Dispute with the World (Ṣalāḥ al-ḥakīm wa-fasād al-ʿālam al-ḏamīm) (Iaşi, 1698), his first printed book, the earliest ethical treatise in Romanian literature and a testimony to his wide knowledge, reading, and proficiency in foreign languages. Completed in 1705 by Athanasius III Dabbās, Patriarch of the Antiochian Church (1684-1694, 1720-1724), the Arabic text is accompanied by the first translation into a modern language, English. Book III contains Cantemir’s version of the Latin work Stimuli virtutum, fraena peccatorum (Amsterdam, 1682) by the Unitarian Andzrej Wiszowaty (Andreas Wissovatius) of Raków (Poland), a chief representative of the Polish Brethren. Thus, in the space of twenty-three years Central-European Protestant ideas reached the Arab Christians of Ottoman Syria, by way of Greek and Arabic.

This volume sheds light on the historical background and political circumstances that encouraged the dialogue between Eastern-European Christians and Arabic-speaking Christians of the Middle East in Ottoman times, as well as the means employed in pursuing this dialogue for several centuries. The ties that connected Eastern European Christianity with Arabic-speaking Christians in the 16th-19th centuries are the focus of this book. Contributors address the Arabic-speaking hierarchs’ and scholars’ connections with patriarchs and rulers of Constantinople, the Romanian Principalities, Kyiv, and the Tsardom of Moscow, the circulation of literature, models, iconography, and knowhow between the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and research dedicated to them by Eastern European scholars.Contributors are Stefano Di Pietrantonio, Ioana Feodorov, Serge Frantsouzoff, Bernard Heyberger, Elena Korovtchenko, Sofia Melikyan, Charbel Nassif, Constantin A. Panchenko, Yulia Petrova, Vera Tchentsova, Mihai Ţipău and Carsten Walbiner.