How often can people who are not connected with history see hand-written books of the 15th century? Rather rare – when visiting exhibitions of the corresponding subject. But even in this case, do they have an opportunity to flip through the ancient manuscripts and to read texts? Certainly not.
A modern man is lucky in many respects – information technologies help him almost everywhere. It seems that their possibilities are infinite. Thanks to these technologies, everybody can get acquainted with the unique documents – five encyclopedias of the 15th century of Efrosin, monk and copyist of the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery. You should just have an access to the Internet.
Employees of the Russian National Library where the manuscripts were kept implemented an interesting project. The Internet resource “Encyclopedias of the 15th Century of Copyist Efrosin – “Leonardo da Vinci of Ancient Rus” is a result of the great and laborious work. The project was presented in the Kirillo-Belozersky Museum-Reserve on June 19.
M.A. Shibaev and E.V. Krushelnitskaya, employees of the Russian National Library, addressed the museum staff. They told about their work and opportunities of their resource. One of its advantages is a convenient and simple way of information search. But the content of the website is even more important. A reader of any level – from professionals to beginners – can find detailed information about the book as if holding it in the hands. Not only the leaves of the hand-written books, but even water-marks of the ancient pages got with the help of ultra violet shooting are placed on the website http://expositions.nlr.ru/EfrosinManuscripts/.
The books of Efrosin are an original and a mysterious in many respects phenomenon of Russian culture. They amaze us with breadth and variety of the subjects, methods of editorial treatment of the compiler, content of the text. Many of them are unique and have come down to us thanks to the copyist of Kirillov. Along with the church and scholastic works in his books, we can also find secular ones, for example “The Tale about Voevode Dracula”.
