THE LIFE OF KING DRAGUTIN DANILO THE SECOND ACC

Abstract

The paper deals with the copy of The Life of King Dragutin, made by priest Dmitar
in his own hand at the Sopoćani Monastery in 1526, today preserved in the Alexander
Hilferding Collection at the Russian National Library in St Petersburg, under signature
number 55. It is a copy which, together with The Life of Queen Jelena, was separated from
Danilo’s collection and made a part of a broader whole along with Teodosije’s The Life of
Saint Sava and In Praise of Saint Simeon and Saint Sava. This copy, in terms of its being
separate from the collection, has this in common with two other collections of texts, one
from the old collection of the National Library of Serbia, entered in its records under no 21,
which was destroyed in World War Two, the other being kept at the National Library “Saint Cyril and Methodius” in Sofia under no 267 (544). In the St Petersburg and Sofia copies
of The Life of King Dragutin, there is a physical break, with one sheet missing, located in
the same place in the text, which points to an earlier but not common source. The variant
of The Life of King Dragutin from the Sopoćani collection is closest to the copy contained
in the collection dating from 1553 and its excerpt from 1763. In the annex to this paper,
we provide the edited text of The Life of King Dragutin from the Sopoćani collection.