LE SYMPOSIUM INTERNATIONAL LE LIVRE. LA ROUMANIE. L ...

When and Where “The Melkite Renaissance” Started?... 471
bishoprics in palestine – Bethlehem and Gaza. 3 We know the number of
palestinian bishops from a record of Bethlehem metropolitan uwakim, who
appeared in Moscow in 1583 for asking alms and gave certain information
about the affairs of the Jerusalem church. 4
however the concept of the gradual hellenization of the palestinian
church can be broken by the fact that the metropolitan uwakim himself was
an Arab. Almost no one source mentioned his ethnic origin. It was not very
important for people of the 16 th century. I discovered an information about
his identity in the most unexpected place – it was a catalog of a manuscript’s
collection of the small lebanese monastery hamatura near tripoli. Among
these manuscripts there is the autograph of uwakim. It is liturgical book
Tipikon which was translated by uwakim into Arabic. the scribe named
himself “uwakim, the metropolitan of Beyt lahm (Bethlehem), the son of
deacon Sarkis, known as Ibn tashlaq, from the village al-K(u)fur”. 5 there
is a settlement al-Kufur in the northern lebanon, in Kisravan; in general
such a name of village is widely spread in the Middle east. 6
the fact of an Arabic origin of uwakim impels us to revise a lot of
episodes of the history of the Middle eastern orthodox community in the
late 16 th century. It is known, that uwakim tried to oppose the succession
of the patriarchal power from Germanus to Sophronius and appeared to
claim the patriarchal throne himself. now this conflict looks not as just a
struggle of ambitious clerics for the power, but as a clash of two tendencies
of the development of the Jerusalem church. It faced two alternatives: the
consolidation of the Greek xenocracy or the conservation of a multiethnic
symbiosis which seemed to exist in the Mamluk period.
An information about the conflict between the old-aged patriarch
and the metropolitan uwakim is very uncertain. the main source is a
colophon of a manuscript of St. John the Chrysostom commentaries, which
was written by the metropolitan of tripoli Dorotheus Daw in January
1579 in the Archangel monastery of Jerusalem. this man was the future
Antiochean patriarch under the name uwakim Daw (1581–1592), who as
3 not counting the bishopric of Sinai which was re-established by Germanus and
occupied by Greeks from the beginning.
4 MurAVIeV A.n., Snosheniya Rossii s Vostokom po delam tserkovnim (Russian-
Oriental Contacts on Ecclesiastical Matters). st.-Petersburg. 1858. Т. 1. p. 128.
5 Makhtutat Deir Sayyida Hamatura Kusba (Manuscripts of the Monastery of the
Holy Virgin Hamatura). № 14 /al-Makhtutat al-Arabiya fi al-Adyira al-Urthuduxiya al-
Antakiya fi Lubnan (Arabic Manuscripts of the Monasteries of the Orthodox Antiochean
Patriarchate in Lebanon) part 1. Beyrut. 1991.
6 I am very grateful to Dr. C.-M. Walbiner (Bonn) for this information.