Syriac Anaphoras

The term „anaphora“ encompasses a range of meanings. On this website „anaphora“ is applied to liturgical forms containing the Eucharistic prayers.

„syriac-anaphoras.org“ provides anaphoral texts which emerged in various Syrian churches – the Syrian Orthodox Church provides an unparalleled number of them. All texts are taken from the rich manuscript tradition. Several hundred relevant manuscripts are spread over the world. A good number of manuscript collections are inaccessible even today, many books have been and still are going to be destroyed due to wars and other catastrophes. We are missing some of the oldest manuscripts which are described in catalogues being lost without any trace. This situation makes it impossible to even fix the exact number of extant anaphoras.

Additionally, there are other problems, connected with the scientific state-of-the-art:

in many cases one and the same anaphora is attributed to different names;
one and the same author is said to have authored more than one anaphora;
there are erroneous ascriptions to authors;
in some cases the identity of an anaphora remains unclear;
we find a kind of „modular system“ in the creation of anaphoras: single anaphoras are enriched by prayers taken from another anaphora;
lots of manuscripts which are introduced in a catalogue are not accessible, not physically, nor in digital or any other form;
we have faint knowledge of „clandestine“ collections;
the area of anaphoral studies is developed rather occasionally than systematically; …

Aspects of that kind would arouse the impression that this website had a somewhat preliminary character. And this will remain true in a medium-term perspective. The data base of texts and information on anaphoras in the background is growing slowly but steadily.

We are offering:

at least one Syriac text of each anaphora (to be uploaded gradually);
the indication of manuscripts containing a certain anaphora;
some information on literature to the anaphoras (not exhaustive);
the search function for every Syriac word in an anaphora the text of which we have already tagged.