The Gennadius Library Inaugurates the Akolouthies Digitization Project
Daphne and Marina Heliades have donated to the Gennadius Library the corpus of printed “Akolouthies” collected by their mother, Dory Papastratou. The collection has been catalogued by Demosthenes Stratigopoulos and published as Ἔντυπες Ἀκολουθίες Ἁγίων, Συλλογὴ Ντόρης Παπαστράτου (Αθήνα 2007) under the scholarly supervision of Kriton Chryssochoidis (Research Director at the Institute for Byzantine Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation). This edition supplements that of Louis Petit, Bibliographie des acolouthies grecques [Subsidia Hagiographica 16] (Bruxelles 1926). The “Akolouthia” records the religious worship that takes place in church and aims to praise the saint on the day that his memory is being celebrated. The printed “Akolouthies” usually have the form of a simple pamphlet or humble booklet (hence they are usually referred in Greek as “φυλλάδες”). The Dory Papastratou collection consists of 665 “Akolouthies” pamphlets and several books, which contain smaller or larger compilations of “Akolouthies” dedicated to one or different saints and to feast days with common characteristics. All search functions of the new Akolouthies database are in Greek.