ABSTRACT
In the Old Slavic literature, a book designated as Tropologion is not known. The author believes that it does not mean that such a book – that has been widely disseminated – has not been familiar to or used by the Old Slavic men of letters, especially in Bulgaria when the old Glagolitic alphabet was already in use in the ninth century. The lack of the book could mean that the earliest Old Slavic books preserved in Cyrillic present a later stage in the development of the hymnographic liturgical books when the designation “Tropologion” became superfluous and started replacing by the new designations of “Menaion”, “Triodion”, etc. The latter designations in all probability as both modern and prestigious for the time were accepted for the newly written liturgical books in Cyrillic. These designations we find in all of the Old Slavic books in Cyrillic. The archaic features of the manuscripts discussed give reasons to assume that in the early Old Slavic epoch, the Tropologion was familiar as a type of liturgical book. It seems very likely that it was the hymnographic book that the two Holy brothers Cyril and Methodios knew and used in their worship in the ninth century.
