On November 24 in the Main Building of the National Library of Russia the signing of a cooperation agreement between the National Library of Russia and the Library of the Serbian Patriarchate took place.
The document was signed by Denis Tsypkin, Director for Specially Valuable Collections of the National Library of Russia, and Zoran Nedeljkovic, Director of the Library of the Serbian Patriarchate. The Serbian delegation included Zoran Rankovic, Dean of the Theological Faculty of the University of Belgrade, and Jelena Slavkovic, an employee of the Library of the Serbian Patriarchate.
The agreement is aimed at establishing long-term partnership relations, development of culture, science and education, preservation and popularization of historical and cultural heritage of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Serbia. Conditions will be created for the organization of cultural, educational and educational programs and projects, in particular projects on digitization of documents.
Denis Tsypkin, Director for Specially Valuable Collections of the National Library of Russia, noted that "the signing of the cooperation agreement is a very important step in the cultural contacts between our countries. The library of the Serbian Patriarchate is a great center for the study of manuscript tradition. And the RNB keeps the best and most important collection of Serbian medieval books in the world. But this is not just an association of scientists from the two centers, because in many ways Serbian and Russian science have common roots. Scientists such as Vladimir Mošin, for example, played a role in Serbian science. He is the creator of Serbian archaeography, who was a deeply Russian person, but he lived and worked in Belgrade for a long time and paid great attention to the creation of Serbian science on manuscripts".
Director of the Library of the Serbian Patriarchate Zoran Nedeljkovic said that "unity within one Orthodox Church is of great importance. This treaty symbolizes the development of very important joint research, on which we will continue to work further. And we see the contribution to this cooperation in the catalog "Manuscripts of Serbian Spelling of the National Library of Russia".
Within the framework of the signing was presented the catalog "Manuscripts of Serbian spelling of the National Library of Russia". The book by Zhanna Levshina, a researcher of the Manuscripts Department, was published by the NLR in 2020. The catalog includes descriptions of 382 whole codices and excerpts of manuscript books of the Serbian version of the Church Slavonic language from the collections of the Manuscripts Department of the National Library of Russia. The manuscripts date from XII-XIX centuries and come from different regions of the Orthodox world (Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Northern Macedonia, Mount Athos, Sinai, etc.). This collection is a valuable set of sources on the history of book and written culture of the South Slavs.
At the end of the event the original Serbian and Russian manuscript books kept in the Manuscripts Department of the National Library of Russia were demonstrated. Among them are one of the oldest surviving Serbian medieval books - the parchment Vukanovo Gospel (c. 1202), the famous for its miniatures and autobiographical record of the scribe Radoslavovo Gospel (1528-1529), the liturgical book written by the monk Averky in the Serbian monastery Studenica in 1617-1618 and partly on Mount Athos.