On Mount Athos in Greece, historian and theologian Serhii Shumylo has identified three previously unknown copies of the Ostroh Bible (1581) in closed monastery book repositories, he reported on his Facebook page. Before this discovery, scholars counted about 350 surviving copies of the 1581 edition, the first full printed Bible in Church Slavonic produced in Ostroh.
Shumylo says one of the new copies may have belonged to the polemicist Ivan Vyshensky or have been brought to Athos by him; another was used by students of the Ukrainian spiritual leader Paisii Velychkovsky and passed from the Niametsky monastery in Romania to Athos. Marginalia in the third show a 1754 transfer from the Poltava regiment to the Ukrainian Cossack skete “Chornyi Vyr” on Athos, a community historically tied to Zaporozhian Cossacks.
During the expedition Shumylo catalogued 32 Cyrillic early prints from the Kyiv metropolia (16th–17th centuries) and 143 Ukrainian 18th-century prints in the same Athonite collections, estimating roughly 200 Ukrainian early prints survive there. The research was supported by the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe and the Gerda Henkel Foundation.