Menaion

The Menaion, from the Greek word for month, is the service book of the fixed calendar: twelve volumes, September through August, following the Byzantine church year that begins in September. Open any volume to any date and the day's liturgical furniture is there: stichera, the hymns sung at the evening psalms of Vespers and at the Praises of Matins; the canon, the long structured hymn of Matins built on nine odes; kathisma hymns sung between sections of the psalter; the apolytikion and kontakion, the short hymns that name the day's celebration; and for greater feasts, readings and litya hymns.

Every day of the year commemorates saints, and the Menaion supplies each with proper texts where the tradition has composed them; for saints without full propers, a companion volume, the General Menaion, offers template services by category, one for a martyr, one for a hierarch, one for a monastic mother, into which any name can be set. The greatest entries are the twelve great feasts and their seasons, whose services the Festal Menaion gathers for use where a parish cannot house the full set. The texts themselves are the work of centuries of hymnographers, and their sheer bulk is a fact of Orthodox life: the Menaion is by far the largest of the service books, and a full set in fine bindings is one of the marks of a well-furnished church.

No Byzantine service can be celebrated from one book. The services' fixed frame lives in the Horologion, the book of hours; the weekly cycle of eight tones, resurrection hymns rotating through the weeks, lives in the Octoechos; the moving cycle around Pascha lives in the Triodion for Lent and the Pentecostarion for the paschal season; and the fixed calendar of the months lives in the Menaion. On any given day, several of these books contribute texts to the same Vespers or Matins, and the art of the Byzantine liturgy is their combination: hymns from the Octoechos and the Menaion interleave in prescribed ratios, and when a great feast falls on a Sunday the rules of precedence decide which book yields. Those rules are the business of the Typikon, without which the shelf of books is unusable.

The Menaion's texts descend from the great hymnographic tradition of Byzantium, with contributions attributed to John of Damascus, Cosmas of Maiuma, Joseph the Hymnographer and many others, expanded and edited over centuries in the monasteries of Palestine, Constantinople and Athos. Translated into Church Slavonic, the books equipped the Slavic churches; modern translations continue the process into English and other languages, usually beginning with the Festal Menaion and growing as communities can sustain more. The system looks forbidding, and is, but it delivers something singular: a daily worship whose texts almost never repeat, cycling through a poetic library assembled over a thousand years.