The Ostrog Bible of Ivan Fyodorov, 1581

The Ostrog Bible is the first complete edition of the Bible in Church Slavonic. It was prepared by Prince Konstantin Ostrozhsky and a circle of scholars gathered around the Ostrog school, and printed by Ivan Fyodorov at the press in the town of Ostrog. The title page of every known copy bears the year 1581.

Ivan Fyodorov is remembered as the publisher of the Apostol of 1564, the first precisely dated printed book of the Tsardom of Russia. He later worked in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and founded the press in Ostrog. The print run of the Bible was huge for its time: an estimated 1000 to 1500 copies. About 350 copies survive today, complete or in part.

The text is set in two columns in the small but legible "Ostrog" typeface. In 1663 the Ostrog Bible was reprinted in Moscow almost without changes, and until the 1740s it remained, in effect, the official version of the Slavonic Bible.