International conference on Rila Monastery: History, Memory, Spirituality

A Musical heritage of the Rila Monastery. Bilingual musical manuscripts (Greek-Old Church Slavonic) conference will be held 28 September – 1 October 2017, at Rila Monastery under a research project, led by Corr. Mem. Prof. Svetlana Kuyumdzhiyeva. The project is funded by the Ministry of Education and Science. The event has been mounted in collaboration with the Institute of Art Studies, BAS, and the management of the monastery and is held under the auspices of His Holiness Neofit, Patriarch of All Bulgaria and Metropolitan of Sofia. Renowned researchers form Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and the Athonite Zographou Monastery will take part in the conference. The problematics to be discussed include topics related to the Rila Monastery, the largest religious and educational hub in this country and one of the largest within the Balkans, having a lot of clout with the entire Orthodox Christendom and a library that has some of the richest European holdings of Slavonic manuscripts. Complexly, such interdisciplinary topics will be addressed as the literary legacy of the cloister, its relations with other religious centres both within and outside Bulgaria; significant figures (clerics, kings, men of letters, icon-painters and persons working in the field of music), associated with this hub; 1,170 years since the death of its patron saint, St John of Rila (+ 946); the monastery in the nation’s memory, etc. A concert will be given of pieces by monastery’s authors and books and artefacts from the cloister will be on display during the conference.