3 Articles Encomia in the Slavonic Сopies of Euthymius Zigabenos’s Panoplia Dogmatike 1 Mariyana Tsibranska-Kostova* Abstract: The paper examines the texts encomia in the Slavonic copies that contain the First and the Second book of Euthymios Zigabenos’s 12 th century Panoplia Dogmatike. The focus is on the following written evidence: the Slavonic translation of PD First book from the first to the 11 th chapter included in two manuscripts: HM.SMS 186 – a 16 th century copy from Hilandar monastery, and another 16 th century manuscript – miscellany III c 16, Mihanovich collection in HAZU; the only copy containing the Second Book of PD in Slavonic – Ms. Slav. BAR 296 from the repository in the Library of the Romanian Academy of Sciences in Bucharest, dated from the very beginning of the 15 th century; the famous Zagreb miscellany of Vladislav the Grammarian from 1469 with excerpts from PD. The texts of encomia are published as a complex for the first time. The author sustains the hypothesis that the Slavonic translation of PD had a close connection with the Athonite monastic brotherhood, whose or- thodoxy and orthopraxy was the main engine for both the appearance of the translation, and its subsequent use and spread, especially in Ottoman times, when the Orthodoxy, more than ever, needed the dogmatic bases of its identity. The article tries to answer the question about the role of encomia in this process. Keywords: encomia, Slavonic Panoplia Dogmatike, Vladislav the Grammarian (Grama- tik), Mount Athos Πανοπλία δογματική (hereinafter PD) – a fundamental work by Euthy- mios Zigabenos, which consists of two books and a total of 28 chapters – is a Byzantine anti-heretical encyclopedia against all known to the author heresies from Simon Magus to Saracens (also called Ishmaelites, Hagarenes, Muslims) 2 . 1 This article has been written under the research project financed by the National Sci- ence Centre (Poland). Decision number: DEC-2016/22/M/HS3/00212.  * Mariyana Tsibranska-Kostova is Professor, D.Sc. at the Institute for Bulgarian Lan- guage, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. E-mail: m.tsibranska@gmail.com 2 Euthymius Zigabenos. Panoplia Dogmatica. – В: Migne, J. P. Patrologiae cursus com- pletes. Series graeca. T.130. Paris, 1865, coll. 9–1359; Wickert, J. Die Panoplia Dogmatica des Euthymios Zigabenos. Berlin, 1910; Berke, M. An annotated edition of Euthymios Zigabe- nos, Panoplia Dogmatikē, Chapters 23–28, Belfast, 2011; Rigo, А. La «Panoplia Dogmatica» Bulgarian Historical Review, 2017, 3–4