To answer the questions that I am posing (who was Thekla in the Slavic tradition? How important was her cult within this tradition?) I intend to gather the whole hagiographical corpus into one work, to improve the possibility to work with the hagiographical traces of one specific saint. This step, i.e. the gathering of a literary corpus and editing it critically, is the first step in analyzing the textual material and will enable others (experts or non-experts) to engage with the amount of texts, written in devotion to this saint. Others have begun such case studies in the South Slavic tradition, e.g. on the cult of Saint Nicholas of Myra and Saint George (Atanassova 2015; Stojkova 2016), but to my knowledge a case study of this extent on a female saint in the Slavic tradition has not yet been attempted so far. That is why this project is unique in its proportions and content: it will not only open new doors in the study of female sainthood, but also in the study of Slavic hagiographical literature in general.
The hagiographical corpus exists of multiple types of texts: prologi (shortened Lives), the Premetaphrastic Martyr act (or the original “Acts of Paul and Thekla”), the Metaphrastic Martyr act (rewriting from the 10th century), the Bulgarian rewriting (“Life of Saint Thekla, translated from the Greek rewriting of Agapios Landos”) and 3 Wonders.