Acts of the Synods of Constantinople

In 1747, after printing a few Arabic liturgical and polemical books in Iași, the capital of Moldavia, Sylvester, patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch, relocated to Bucharest. There, he established an Arabic-type press at the Church of Saint Spyridon, a metochion recently granted to him by the Phanar-born Prince Constantin Mavrocordatos. Until recently, the Acts of the Synods of Constantinople, a miscellany printed by Sylvester in Bucharest in 1747, were considered lost. This collection contains Arabic texts used in the fight against the Latin creed and the Greek Catholic Melkite Church, which emerged after a schism of 1724. Among these texts are the acts issued by the Synods of Constantinople in 1723, 1725, and 1727 translated from Greek into Arabic. They include the names of all the signing clerics, as well as those they excommunicated. Other sections contain a meticulously composed refutation of the primary Latin “inventions” and a historical account of the Syrian Christians’ situation during Sylvester’s era. This volume is a re-edition of the Arabic text, accompanied by an English annotated translation. It is based on a recently discovered copy of the editio princeps, an outcome of the TYPARABIC project research.