Several weeks before Easter the Bulgarian capital city of Sofia hosts an exhibition, dedicated to the Bible – the book that symbolizes the belief and ethics of Christianity as a religion. The citizens and the guests of Sofia will have the chance to get acquainted with the history of the Book of books from its first appearance on ancient manuscripts to printing and modern technologies. 10 information boards and showcases will expose different exhibits, such as replicas of archaeological monuments , old scrolls and papyruses, confirming the authenticity of the events, described in the Holy Writ. The more curious visitors will be able to learn interesting facts, such as the one that the Bible was named after the Phoenician coastal town of Biblos, which means “a corpus of documents”. It is also interesting that the Bible was the first printed book in the world. It is also among bestsellers and is the most often translated writing. Parts of it had been translated into over 2400 languages till 2007. The smallest Bible in the world that has been filmed on a microfilm and can be read only under a microscope or be projected on screen is also among the exhibits. The smallest printed book is also among the exhibits, containing the “Our Father” prayer, translated in 7 different languages. A small, water-resistant Bible that has been secretly distributed in water tanks throughout the entire former Soviet Union also attracts the attention of the visitors. There is some special room provided for a replica of the printing press of Johannes Gutenberg, on which the first Bible was printed back in 1456. The replica was made by a carpenter from the Bulgarian town of Rousse in the original Gutenberg pattern, well-preserved today. The printing press is functioning and every visitor can take a verse of Psalm 119, printed by it.
“Johannes Gutenberg himself printed 180 Bibles, but since the printing process was very expensive then, it cost 160 average wages of a German worker at the time – Mr. Mihail Mihailov, who is in the role of a printer during the exhibition. – Besides that, Gutenberg didn’t print the capital letters of the sentences and the separate chapters. They were drawn later, which made the whole procedure even more expensive. There are 48 copies of the Gutenberg Bibles preserved today, most of them – in German museums. One of them was sold at an auction for EUR 5 mln. in 1987, which made it the most expensive book worldwide at that time.”
Bibles, printed in 50 different languages can be seen at the exhibition. The more exotic of them are the language of the Eskimos, the Braille system and also the Arabian, Jewish and Turkish languages. There is also a replica of the tabernacle from the Old Testament in scale 1:25 and also a model of the Noah’s Ark in scale 1:100. There is a special room provided for the history of the Bible on Bulgarian territory.
“The Bible in Bulgaria has become the reason for the creation of the Cyrillic alphabet – Mr. Lachezar Manchev, one of the organizers of the exhibition explains. – While studying the lifestyle of the Slavs, the Thessalonica brothers Cyril and Methodius found out that these people didn’t have their own Bible. They wanted the Slavs to be able to read it in their own language and that is why the brothers created the first Cyrillic alphabet. The Bible was the first book, translated in the new language. Then students were trained so that they could rewrite the Bible and distribute it to the Slavs. Thus the Holy Book brought the new alphabet to all Slavonic regions, where people started to create their own education, science and culture afterwards.”
There are exhibits from the private collection of the German Stefan Piltz at the exhibition. He has been living in Bulgaria for several years and his collection has already toured around almost all German-speaking countries. It was exhibited last year in the Bulgarian marina capital of Varna and the Danube town of Rousse.
English version: Zhivko Stanchev
