A Medieval Czech Penitential Prayer Behind the Cryptographic Enigma of Santa Maria La Nova?

Abstract

This paper presents renewed attack on the encrypted inscription housed in the Turbolo Chapel of the Neapolitan Church of Santa Maria La Nova. Following the cryptanalytic hypothesis of monoalphabetic substitution and the multilingual leads explored in related works, the present contribution investigates Old Czech, a candidate not yet systematically tested against the cipher. Through a combination of n-gram-driven automated decryption via AZdecrypt and LLM-assisted segmentation of the resulting scriptio continua, a candidate reading has been obtained, pointing to a medieval Czech penitential prayer. Although a definitive solution cannot be provided without the support of philologists and cryptologists versed in Czech and related languages, the convergence of statistical, lexicographic and thematic evidence constitutes to date the strongest cue for this long-standing historical puzzle.