dr Agata Ewa Sowińska
Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach
VIII KONGRES MEDIEWISTÓW POLSKICH - GNIEZNO 2025

List of papers
The Coptic version of the "Romance of Alexander" and the legend of the Wawel holophagus. Content issues

Previous research on the figure of the Wawel Whole-Eater is confined to several scientific disciplines: history, literary studies, and archaeology. Literature is leading us to the provenance of the creature appearing in the works of Wincenty Kadłubek. He was supposed to use the then-popular so-called "Romance of Alexander" - a story about Alexander the Great, which circulated in various content and language versions for centuries (from the 3rd/4th century AD to the modern period). Interestingly, not all versions contain the motif of the creature (and therefore identical to the Wawel beast), or at least not the Latin versions from which Kadłubek could draw. The Coptic "Romance" is supposed to be one of those versions that contain the so-called "dragon episode" (the other is the Syriac version). My presentation - as a classical philologist and coptologist - intends to examine the Coptic text of the "Romance" to verify the validity of the thesis about the presence of the "dragon question"