The Croatian Tradition of The Story of Akir the Wise in South Slavonic Recensions

This paper attempts to uncover the textual relationships between Croatian manuscripts of the Story of Akir the Wise and other South Slavonic copies of the same text. The Story of Akir the Wise, an apocryphal text originating in the ancient Middle East earlier than 500 B.C., was translated into Church Slavonic, probably in the 12th or the 13th century. The story was disseminated mostly among the Orthodox Slavs, but was also transmitted to the Catholic Slavs in Croatia. The South Slavonic copies, although outnumbered by the Russian ones, include the oldest extant manuscript preserved at the Savina Monastery in Montenegro. The question of the Slavonic archetype of the Story is still open because of the absence of a Greek recension. In Croatia, three copies have been preserved in Glagolitic, Cyrillic, and Latin scripts. This paper treats the South Slavonic copies of the Story, composed from the 14th to the 17th century inside and outside Croatia, and points out some textual features connecting the Croatian copies with other Cyrillic copies composed in Serbia and Bulgaria. Based on text-critical analysis, it is argued that the Croatian copies have a common source, which is a descendent of another older source that appeared in the Slavia Orthodoxa; some Serbian and Bulgarian copies also derived from that source. The paper also argues that the scribes of the Story not only copied their source texts but furthermore intentionally engaged in editing their texts in accordance with the language practices and social environment within which they worked