The Gǝʿǝz Version of the Passio of St Cyricus (Gadla Qirqos): A Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary

• Applicant: Vitagrazia Pisani, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 468455109

Cyricus is a saint and martyr very popular throughout the Christian world. According to the narration of his Passio, attested in several versions and languages, Cyricus was almost three years old when he endured the martyrdom at Tarsus (in Asia Minor) together with his mother Julitta. It happened at the beginning of the fourth century CE, during Diocletian’s persecutions against the Christians of the Roman Empire. In the Ethiopian tradition, the devotion of Cyricus, known here as Qirqos, is very ancient and popular, already attested in the twelfth–thirteenth century. The Gadla Qirqos is the Ethiopic version of the Passio of the St Qirqos. This is one of the texts found in the manuscripts of the large canonical-liturgical collection of the Gadla samāʿtāt, but also enjoying independent circulation, in a considerable number of manuscript witnesses. The tradition on Qirqos has been largely neglected by research: so far, no published edition or translation of his Ethiopic Passio is available. A new thorough critical edition, taking into account all known witnesses, is therefore an urgent desideratum. The project therefore aims to provide a reliable critical edition of the Gadla Qirqos, using all known witnesses and applying a stemmatological reconstructive (so-called Neo-Lachmannian) method. The project will also provide the English translation of the text with a detailed philological commentary on some of the more crucial passages. The reconstruction of the Gadla Qirqos will be of great relevance not only for philologists, but also for scholars of other disciplines of Ethiopian studies. It will help to understand the diffusion and transmission of this text, and more in general the transmission of the Gadla samāʿtāt, in which it is contained, and to give new insights into the study of the veneration of Qirqos in Ethiopia and Eritrea. This study will also help to investigate the origin of this text and its circulation within the entire Christian World, and the contacts between the various Churches and literary traditions. In a comparative prospective it will be thus very important for other fields dealing with hagiographic, apocryphal and religious studies. An additional year for the project is necessary to complete the major tasks that are currently underway but not yet completed. During the extension, I will finalize the critical edition of the Gadla Qirqos, complete the English translation of the text along with its philological commentary, and prepare a monograph that includes the edited text, its critical apparatus and the translation. Additionally, I will continue working on the edition of the volume that compiles all the papers presented at the international workshop I organized in the project’s final year, which will be published as a peer-reviewed supplement to the journal Aethiopica.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants