Prayers at the Blessing of a Vineyard, Grapes and Wine in the Ancient Byzantine and Slavo-Romanian Euchologia

Prayers at the Blessing of a Vineyard, Grapes and Wine in the Ancient Byzantine and Slavo-Romanian Euchologia

20 March 2022

The current Euchologion contains four prayers regarding exclusively the vine and its fruit: a prayer for the planting and another for the harvesting of a vineyard, a prayer at the partaking of grapes on the sixth day of August, and one at the blessing of wine. However, besides these, the ancient Byzantine Euchologia contain a larger number of prayers with the same object, which have unfortunately fallen into disuse. The purpose of this study is to identify this kind of prayers in the ancient manuscripts of the Byzantine Rite and to present their content. In addition, a section of the paper focuses on the presence of such prayers in some Slavo-Romanian Euchologia dating from the 16th-17th centuries. The author analyses a number of seventeen prayers (with variants), most of them of non-Constantinopolitan origin, and concludes that this abundance of euchological material was a consequence of the liturgical use of wine in the Eucharist and other rites. Moreover, based on the information provided in this paper, the author proposes some textual revisions of the current prayers.