Typarabic

Several volumes of the EAPE series, published by De Gruyter and dedicated to the outcomes of the TYPARABIC project, are now held in the collections of Qatar National Library. We extend our sincere thanks to Fr. Charbel Nassif, Rawad Bou Malhab, Head of Manuscripts and Archives at Qatar National Library, and the Library staff for their support in making the project’s outputs accessible to historians, students, researchers, and the wider academic community.

The Heritage Library at Qatar National Library in Doha also displays one of the most significant works in the TYPARABIC project corpus: the Gospel printed in Aleppo in 1706 by Athanasios Dabbas. Together, these materials demonstrate the project’s broad scholarly reach and contribute to making the history of Arabic printing more accessible to researchers and the public.

The "Charles I" Central University Library of Bucharest (BCU) and the Library of the Holy Synod organized an interesting exhibition of early printed books last week, jointly prepared by Dr. Andreea Badea of BCU and Archimandrite Policarp Chițulescu, our former colleague on the TYPARABIC team. The exhibition offered a collection of Akathistos Hymns in Greek, Slavonic and Romanian, dated in the 17th-19th centuries. Ioana Feodorov attended the exhibition opening and greatly enjoyed the excellent presentation of these beautiful and spiritually enriching books. The Akathistos Hymn to the Mother of God was one of the TYPARABIC team's research objects, with several contributions to project conferences and chapters published in collected works on the first version of the Arabic Akathistos Hymn, its manuscripts, and new information discovered about its first printed versions. Comparing the Eastern European versions with the Arabic ones remains an interesting line of inquiry, given the shared Byzantine roots of all the cultures that produced them.

On Friday, September 25, Octavian-Adrian Negoiță, our colleague on the TYPARABIC team, presented at the National Museum of Arts of Romania's autumn conference his preliminary remarks and a wealth of images from his trip to Alexandria and Cairo last January, together with two other team members, Archimandrite Policarp Chițulescu and Ioana Feodorov. The beauty of the icons, manuscripts, documents, and liturgical vestments in the collections of the Patriarchate of Alexandria and All Africa matches their interest in history and artistic achievement. Rich in items that connect this age-old Patriarchate with the Romanian Principalities in Ottoman times, the Alexandria and Cairo Christian collections await researchers devoted to the history of the Eastern Churches.

We are happy that three volumes of the EAPE series were displayed at the De Gruyter Brill booth during the Religions 360 conference held at the Law Faculty of the University of Bucharest this week. Thank you, Aaron Sanborn-Overby and colleagues!

While in Paris for the 32nd congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants on 7-11 September, Ioana Feodorov had the privilege of a private visit to the Humathéque, a splendid academic hub of humanist science and research, situated at 10, cours des Humanités, 93322 Aubervilliers. Endowed with state-of-the-art facilities, bright and welcoming, the Humathéque at Campus Condorcet offers access to nearly one million items: books and journals, photographs, films, maps and sound recordings, in both physical and digital formats. More than 50 libraries, document collections, and archive services across 25 sites in the Île-de-France region have contributed their collections to this library. Organized into eight research areas, most materials are available for open access and can be borrowed. Rare or valuable collections are held in the stacks and can be consulted in a dedicated reading room. Our host, Anas Alaili, Chargé de collections en études arabes, référent & chargé de collection en arts, littératures et langages, gave us an overview of the library's sections and structure, which reveal a thoughtful and ingenious division by carefully chosen domains, in cooperation with the experts of the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes (IRHT). As its acquisitions program is ongoing, Ioana took this opportunity to present to the hosts the series dedicated by De Gruyter to the TYPARABIC project, Early Arabic Printing in the East (EAPE), and those dedicated by Brill to Arabic Christianity - ACTS and TESC -, which would greatly benefit all researchers of the Middle East. In future, Ioana and her colleagues on the TYPARABIC team intend to benefit from working at the Humathéque whenever they visit Paris. The ten volumes in the EAPE series, as well as Paul of Aleppo's Journal published by Brill (Vol. 1, 2024) and other volumes in the ACTS and TESC series offer important contributions to the fields of Christian Arabic studies, the history of the Ottoman Empire, Mediterranean studies, Byzantine studies, etc., which would make a useful addition to the already rich collections of the Humathéque, one of the few European libraries that is still expanding its holdings.

A few former members of the TYPARABIC team and colleagues who have contributed to the team's conferences were in Iași for the past two days, attending an international conference jointly convened by the “A.D. Xenopol” Institute of History of the Romanian Academy and the ERC-funded ORTHPOL project, directed in Vienna by Ovidiu Olar, in collaboration with The Faculty of History, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași / “N. Iorga” Institute of History of the Romanian Academy (Bucharest) / Iași Municipality /Metropolitanate of Moldova and Bucovina / Holy Putna Monastery / Holy Probota Monastery / The Municipal Museum “Regina Maria” of Iași. We continue to follow the research of our former colleagues, whose intensive study and exploratory trips during the project period have yielded a rich corpus of materials and sources that continue to support their work and produce further outcomes. Thus, Vera Chentsova spoke about the "Metropolitan Peter Movilă’s Project of the Edition of the Lives of the Saints: Manuscript Evidence"; Mihail Qaramah addressed the "Ruthenian Liturgical Influences on the Church of Ungro-Vlachia in the 17th Century"; Anca Elisabeta Tatai and Cornel Tatai-Baltă reported on "New Evidence on the Relations between Romanian and Ukrainian Printing Houses in the Age of Matei Basarab in the Light of Iconographic Findings"; Mihail-George Hâncu's paper dealt with "Translating a Slavonic Grammar for Romanian Readers: Notes on the Seventeenth-Century Treatise Attributed to Staico the Grammarian"; Archimandrite Policarp Chițulescu presented a paper titled '“Écrivant et traduisant autant que j’ai pu prévaloir en ces siècles difficiles pour le pays.” Nouvelles perspectives sur l’activité du Saint Hiérarque Dosoftei, métropolite de Moldavie.' We look forward to the publication of the papers for the benefit of all interested readers in the academic community.

It's here! Volume 9 of the series Early Arabic Printing in the East has reached us in Bucharest. Volume 9 of the EAPE series, "Prefaces to 18th Century Christian Arabic Books", is a collection of metatexts from Arabic books printed in the Romanian Principalities and the Ottoman East in the 18th-century. This volume supplements the information presented in EAPE-8, a descriptive catalog of this corpus, by providing the complete Arabic text and English translation of prefaces and other texts accompanying the main work. The authors of these metatexts address the Arabic-speaking Christian readership and the benefactors who supported the printing of the books. The material is organized into three sections: Athanasios Dabbas’s printing activities while he was Metropolitan of Aleppo, between two terms as Patriarch of Antioch; book printing at the Melkite Monastery of Saint John the Baptist in Shuwayr (Khinshara); and books printed under the direction of Patriarch Sylvester of Antioch in Iași, Bucharest, and Beirut. Thus, this volume reflects the chronological stages in the development of book printing among Arabic-speaking Christians in the 18th century.

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111324609/html

The author of volume 9, Yulia Petrova, a Senior Researcher in the TYPARABIC team, is an experienced Arabist employed by the Institute for Oriental Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv. She has authored a number of books, articles, and chapters in collected works, and has worked with Ioana Feodorov on several Arabic editions published by Brill Editors, including the Arabic version of Demetrius Cantemir’s Divan, achieved in 1705 by Athanasius III Dabbas, a Patriarch of the Church of Antioch, and the Journal of the Archdeacon Paul of Aleppo.

The papers from the last TYPARABIC conference, held in Bucharest in March this year, have been published in the latest issue of the Review of Ecumenical Studies (1/2026), jointly edited by the "Lucian Blaga" University in Sibiu and the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu. This issue of the RES explores the multifaceted religious and cultural landscape of printing in pre-modern Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. It offers a comprehensive view of these regions’ diverse confessional practices and their impact on society, politics, church life, and the book culture of the Eastern Christian Churches. The authors are: Ioana Feodorov, Mihail Khalid Qaramah, Charbel Nassif, Mihai Țipău, Vera Tchentsova, Alina Kondratiuk, and Anca Elisabeta Tatay. Two interesting reviews of recent sources complete the volume, which is freely downloadable from here: https://reference-global.com/issue/RESS/18/2 .
Hosted by the Paradigm portal, RES is one of the leading religious studies journals published in Open Access in Romania, indexed by Sciendo, CEJSH, EBSCO, ERIH PLUS, etc.

We are delighted to announce that our newest EAPE volume, authored by our colleague, Yulia Petrova, "Prefaces of the 18th-Century Christian Arabic Books. Texts and Translations", is now available in Open Access: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111324609/html .

At the invitation of Peter Sragher, President of FITRALIT, the Translation Branch of the Romanian Writers’ Union in Bucharest, Yulia Petrova, Nicholas Bishara, Ioana Feodorov and Răzvan Bucuroiu took part in a roundtable discussion on Arabic literature translated into Romanian, and on Arabic books printed in the Romanian Principalities in the 18th century. Ioana presented a project to fully translate the Journal of Paul of Aleppo into Romanian and English. Yulia discussed Volume 9 of the "Early Arabic Printing in the East" series, published by De Gruyter, which is part of her work on the TYPARABIC project. This project was funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council for the period 2021–2026. In this volume, Yulia provides translations of all the metatexts within the corpus examined by the project team, which comprises 54 titles of Arabic books printed in Wallachia, Moldavia, and Greater Syria between 1701 and 1799. Nicholas Bishara read in Arabic excerpts from Paul of Aleppo’s journal and prefaces to the 18th-century Arabic books. Răzvan Bucuroiu, a PhD candidate at the Romanian Academy’s School of Advanced Studies, recounted the fascinating story of Emil Murakade’s first translation of a celebrated poem by Mihail Eminescu into Arabic, which was published in a commemorative journal collection in 1939: ‘Rugaciunea unui dac’, while Peter Sragher read the Romanian original masterfully. This unique literary encounter between Arabists and literary critics highlighted the importance of translating Arabic literature into Romanian for both literary experts and literature-loving readers. The event is featured in the latest issue of the Literary Translations Review, edited by FITRALIT, issue no. 118/August 2026. The video of this interesting literary colloquium can be viewed here: https://www.fitralit.ro/31-08-2026-fitralit-colocviile-de-traduceri-literare-58-file-de-literatura-araba-cu-si-despre-romani-de-la-paul-din-alep-la-atanasie-dabbas-si-silvestru-al-antiohiei-mihai-eminescu-tradus-in-araba-in-1939/