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Old Church Slavic and Church Slavic: Primary and Secondary Resources at the Library of Congress

Digital Resources

Through various partnerships and exchanges, the Library of Congress has several significant Old Church Slavonic and Church Slavic manuscripts available online in its digital collections. One major source for these manuscripts is St. Catherine's Monastery located near Mount Sinai in Egypt. Home to the oldest continuously operating library in the world, St. Catherine's Monastery holds around 3,300 manuscripts, mainly pertaining to early Christianity. Although the majority of the manuscripts are in Greek, a sizable number are in Church Slavic. The Library of Congress microfilmed around 1,600 manuscripts from St. Catherine's collection, including forty-four in Church Slavic. These Church Slavic manuscripts represent a wide range of genres, from church laws and commentaries to psalters and books from the New Testament. The digital copies of the Church Slavic manuscripts from St. Catherine's can be found here:

The second source for digitized manuscripts is the World Digital Library, a project initiated by the Library of Congress with the support of UNESCO. Launched in 2009, the World Digital Library was a free online repository which contained thousands of digitized primary sources from around the world. Several prominent national libraries contributed to the effort, including the National Library of Russia and the State Library of Russia. In 2021 the digital content of the World Digital Library was fully migrated to the Library of Congress' website, where it is now archived and accessible. The following list contains digitized Old Church Slavonic and Church Slavic manuscripts that are part of the World Digital Library. The items are listed alphabetically by title with links to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content are included when available.

Church Slavic Manuscripts from the World Digital Library