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Post a Comment The Poetic Inscription in Honour of the Child-Martyr Gabriel
Abstract
This paper provides a transcription of an inscription in honour of the Orthodox saint Gabriel of Zabłudów, also known as Gabriel of Białystok, Slutsk. Today only a photograph of the inscription, kept in the collections of the National Historical Museum of the Republic of Belarus, remains. The inscription consists of two not entirely identical syllabic epitaphs in honour of Gabriel, dating from the mid-18th century, one in Cyrillic, the other in Latin script. In both cases, the text of the epitaph is written in thirteen syllables with a caesura after the seventh syllable, with paired feminine rhyme. Both epitaphs report that Gabriel was murdered in 1690 in Białystok (now in Poland) by a group of Jews, indicating that the inscription is set in the context of medieval and early modern accusations against Jews known as the “Blood Libel”. The authorship of the epitaphs to Gabriel cannot be accurately identified at this time. The two epitaphs are the only source of information about the child-martyr Gabriel; everything that has ever been written about him goes back to this text. The two syllabic epitaphs to Gabriel represent a typical example of Baroque occasional verse, since the funeral inscription was one of the most widespread cultural phenomena during the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The case of Saint Gabriel of Zabłudów is a very late example of the memorialisation of infant martyrs, alleged victims of “ritual murder”, in the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The autocephalous Orthodox community of the Polish-Lithuanian state had an extremely tense relationship with the rapidly growing Greek Catholic Church; in such a situation the veneration of its own saints, and of Gabriel in particular, constituted a more conscious confessional affiliation. Under the dominance of the Polish sociocultural model, an inscription intended for the Orthodox community was in fact the product of inter-confessional cultural symbiosis.
DOI: 10.31168/2305-6754.2025.2.04
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