Sylvester was a Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch in the 18th century, so rather out of our period of history. His accession in 1724 led to a schism, creating the Greek Catholic Church, as a portion of his church preferred communion with Rome. He is remembered for his attempts to get books printed for his flock: not a simple matter in the Ottoman Empire. The post earlier about the unpublished collection of his official letters led me to wonder who he was. I learned via BlueSky that a study on his life has recently been published through De Gruyer-Brill, as part of a series on Arabic printing:
Ţipău, Mihai. Sylvester of Antioch: Life and Achievements of an 18th-Century Christian Orthodox Patriarch, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110988420
The abstract:
In 1724, Sylvester, a native of the island of Cyprus, was elected Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch and All the East. For more than four decades, he endeavored to preserve the legacy of one of the earliest Christian Churches in the Levant. He faced major challenges because of the ever changing balance of power between the Latin Church and its missionaries, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the French and English interests in the Levant, and the central and local Ottoman authorities.
In his efforts to provide church books for the Arab Orthodox Christians, Sylvester was helped by rulers of the Romanian Principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia. He printed a number of books in Jassy and Bucharest and opened an Arabic press in Beirut. Alongside his patriarchal duties,
Sylvester was also an accomplished icon painter. His works, in the Post-Byzantine Greek style of the 18th century, are preserved in Syrian and Lebanese churches, as well as elsewhere. Their study reveals just another aspect of his complex activity.
The book presents for the first time in English the biography and achievements of Sylvester of Antioch, based on a wide range of contemporary Greek, Arabic and Romanian historical sources.
Pleasingly, this book is open-access, in PDF and epub formats. That means that you can read about this oriental dignitary of the Ottoman Empire on your phone while sitting in a train carriage on your way to work.