Summary
The legendary story of the Athonite Dochiariou Monastery is associated with the protection and help of the Holy archangels. The body of narratives has continued to grow over time to take on its final form in the early sixteenth century. The earliest extant texts are Slavonic translations associated with the pen of Vladislav the Grammarian (the second half of the fifteenth century). A bilingual (in Greek and Slavonic) manuscript of the late fifteenth century is kept at Dochiariou, providing an account of the miracles worked by the archangels at the monastery. Versions of the Dochiariou legends were gaining currency in Russia to be included in the reading menaia, synaxaria and panegyrika. Thesaurus by Damascenus Studites played a significant role in the popularity of the miracles. Proskynetarion of the Dochiariou (1843), gave a detailed account of the miracles. The earliest representations of the Dochiariou miracles have been lost, though there are written records of their existence of the fourteenth century. The full cycle of the miracles is illustrated at the catholicon of Dochiariou as well as at the refectory and on the phiale. The monastery published also a series of prints circulating the main scenes of the Dochiariou cycle and rendering them generally available. The earliest in Bulgaria illustration of the miracle with the boy rescued from drowning is at the Church of the Nativity in Arbanassi (1640s). Three of the scenes from the cycle occur on a series of icons of the Archangel Michael with scenes of the miracles of the archangels painted in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries. An analysis showed that they had been inspired by Damascenus Studites’s Thesaurus. The murals at two churches within the complex of Bachkovo Monastery (of the Holy Archangels and the church of the same name in Kluviata locality) include cycles of scenes of the Dochiariou miracles, modelled on a 1809 Dochiariou print. The emblematic scene depicting the rescue of the boy from the waves is found on iconostases painted by masters from Debar in the late nineteenth-century Bulgaria’s northwest. A woodcarver, possibly coming from Debar too, sculpted the episode of translating the treasure at the church of the village of Teshevo, the region of Gotse Delchev.
