Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/athos/en/e218dm01.asp

Greek Documents

Archival documents are probably the most important source of material for the historian and certainly the most important source for the study of the societies and economies of the past, in every country and civilisation which functioned on the basis of the written word. The same documents used at any given moment to shape or record events are those subsequently used by the historian to reconstruct and evaluate them. While narrative sources usually limit us to generalities, archival material lets us look at the details of daily life. Further, the material contained in archives is original, untampered with since the age in which it was first published, and thus generally more reliable than the narrative of any individual historian, who is usually writing after the events he is describing and so, voluntarily or involuntarily, frequently colours his account according to his personal political or ideological prejudices.
After the papyri of the Hellenistic, Roman and Early Byzantine periods, there is no original material extant in Greece earlier than the end of the ninth century. After that date there are numerous archival collections, with the volume increasing steadily, of course, the nearer we come to the present day. For the Middle Ages, the documents are few in number and thus exceptionally precious; and these have been exhaustively studied. For the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the quantities of material are so great that an exhaustive study is impossible.
The archives of the Athonite monasteries constitute the principal collection of original ninth- to fifteenth-century Byzantine documents that have come down to us. Other collections, naturally much smaller, are preserved at Meteora and in the monastery on the island of Patmos. There are also a number of original documents from the Byzantine administration in Lower Italy. Other Byzantine documents exist at various locations around the world, but these are exceedingly few in number. Our knowledge is however supplemented by documents existing in the form of copies, and particularly in monasterial codices, where medieval archivists copied the entire content of the archives of certain monasteries (notably those of the Makrynitissa Monastery on Mt Pelion, the Lemviotissa Monastery near Smyrna, and the Vazelon Monastery near the Black Sea).
While all the monasteries on Mount Athos have their own archives, some are far more important than others. In certain monasteries, such as the Great Lavra and the Iviron, Vatopedi and Chelandari Monasteries, the Byzantine archives are extremely important, with over a hundred documents, many of exceptional importance and considerable length. In most cases, however, the Byzantine archives are relatively small, including no more than a few dozen documents; some, such as those of the Konstamonitou and Karakalou Monasteries, have only a few Byzantine documents, while others, such Stavronikita, Simonopetra and Gregoriou, have none at all.
A monastery's archives contain documents relating to both the history and organisation of the foundation and of course to its assets. The internal regulations known as typika ( rules ), the wills of their abbots and the rare written decisions of monks in positions of authority are the main types of documents relating to the administration of the monastery and the spiritual life of its inhabitants. Mount Athos, however, with its central administrative authority of the Protaton, has ancient documents delimiting the monastic peninsula and typika regulating monastic life throughout the territory, especially in Karyes, starting from the celebrated Tragos signed in 972 by the Emperor John Tsimisces himself.
A monastery's assets are mirrored in its archives. Records of books, icons and other treasures or tools give us an idea of the foundation's movable property. But we learn even more about its real property, the acquisition of which was always documented in writing. Deeds of sale, bequests, exchanges, adjustments, wills, long term tenancies, private legal documents of every description bring to life before our eyes the relations of monastery with private individuals and with other monks. Then there are the public documents, from the hands of emperors, senior officials, state functionaries, judges and ecclesiastical authorities from the Patriarch to ordinary priests, from the Protos of Mount Athos and the Synaxis at Karyes: they tell about relations between the monastery and the authorities, the taxes they paid, the privileges they enjoyed and how they won them, how they dealt with the claims advanced against them by lay persons and other monks. They refer to lands and estates both on Mount Athos and beyond it, in Chalkidiki especially but also in Macedonia, in the North Aegean (particularly the island of Lemnos), and in the cities: Thessaloniki, Serres, Veroia, Kavala, and above all Constantinople.
Beyond the monastery's own assets, however, a monastery's archives will often contain documents dealing with financial transactions between laymen. When a property ended up on a monastery's roll, perhaps as a bequest, it was frequently accompanied by the entire file pertaining to its title, for this would be necessary in case of dispute. Thus, the Great Lavra has documents relating to imperial privileges granted to one Leon Cephalas, a military officer who lived in the penultimate decade of the eleventh century: these passed to the monastery together with the lands they describe, as a bequest from the man's descendants in the twelfth century. Or, a man who decided to retreat to a monastery would bring his personal papers with him, and these might well end up in the general archives, even though they were of no practical use to the foundation. This is how the Sultan's berat of 1483 appointing Symeon to the Patriarchate came to be in the Vatopedi Monastery, for that is where the Patriarch spent his final years. It has no legal value, for that would have ceased with the resignation of the beneficiary, but it is still a fascinating document.
This mixture of documents is what makes the Athonite archives so extraordinarily important in the study of Greece's medieval history: they contain so much important material on the economy and the society of the period. The Xenophontos and Zographou Monasteries contain records of property acquired as pronoiai, thus giving us a glimpse of the principle method of payment of the armed forces in the later Byzantine period. A bill of sale in the Docheiariou Monastery tells us of magnificent private houses in twelfth-century Thessaloniki that had deteriorated and had been subdivided into small flats and shops. A judicial decision in the Iviron Monastery describes how agricultural investments and improvements were made in Thessaloniki in the year 1400. And the documents relating to privileges and tax exemptions are legion, indicating that from the twelfth century onwards social organisation was based on privilege.
Apart from the Byzantine documents, the Athonite archives preserve a number of acts by the Emperors of Trebizond (Dionysiou Monastery), medieval documents from foreign rulers, and a few, generally insignificant, Latin documents: their main bulk, however, consists of Bulgarian, Serb and (later) Vlach and Russian documents. The contacts between the monastic peninsula and Orthodox Christendom expanded tremendously in the years following the thirteenth century, and are reflected in the archives. There are Slav documents, mainly in the Bulgarian Zographou Monastery, documents in Serbian in Chelandari, and documents in Russian in St Panteleimon. And there are other such documents in other monasteries as well, monasteries that once had contacts with Slav-speaking countries, or metochia (dependencies) in Roumania. There are also documents in Greek, issued by the fourteenth-century Serb rulers who had occupied Macedonia and Mount Athos, for that was the time when the Serb monarch had assumed the title of King and Emperor of Serbia and Roumania (that is, of Byzantium).
Extant medieval Slav documents are even rarer than Byzantine documents, making those in the Athonite archives extremely important.
The fourteenth century brought the Ottoman Turks to Macedonia, and by the fifteenth century they had made it theirs. Their presence as lords and masters of Mount Athos from then until 1912 is reflected in the monasterial archives. A large number of Turkish documents has been preserved, many of which date back to the time of the conquest and the fifteenth century, a period relatively poorly covered in the (otherwise extremely rich) Turkish National Archives.
There are also numerous Greek documents from this period, mostly relating to monasterial property and to litigation with other Christians; ecclesiastical and private documents. Apart from their historical value, these are also of considerable linguistic importance for, in an age of limited literacy, they are written phonetically and thus document the evolution of the various dialects.
While there are relatively few Greek papers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the eighteenth century on their numbers increase, reaching the thousands by the time we reach the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this period, however, the Athonite documents have lost the uniqueness of those dating from the Middle Ages, since similar collections exist in many other monasteries and in public archives in Greece.
The study of the archives of Mount Athos has made substantial progress only in this century. The Parisian series Archives de l Athos is systematically publishing the medieval documents, and abridged versions of the post-Byzantine documents are being published by the Institute for Byzantine Studies in Athens. There have also been numerous isolated publications in periodicals and special editions.
The bibliography below is far from exhaustive; it is designed to provide the reader with a guide enabling him to find his way around the Archives of Mount Athos.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
For older publications, see Manousakas 1963, pp. 391-414, and Oikonomides 1967, pp. 489-93.
Principal editions of archives: Actes de Zographou 1907. Actes de Chilandar 1911. Actes de Chilandar 1912 [1915]. Actes de PhilothΓe 1913. Binon 1942. Actes de Kutlumus 1945, 1988. Manousakas 1963. Actes de Xeropotamou 1964. Nikolopoulos - Economidis 1966, pp. 257-327. Actes de Dionysiou 1968. Economidis 1970 (1) pp. 416-36. Economidis 1970 (2) pp. 437-58. Actes de Lavra 1970-1982, I-IV. Actes de Esphigmenou 1973. Actes du PrΥtaton 1975. Actes de Kastamonitou 1978. Economidis 1979, pp. 197-263. Actes de Saint-PantΓlΓΛmon 1982. Actes de Docheiariou 1984. Vamvakas 1985, pp. 105-53. Chrysochoidis 1985, pp. 7-104. Actes d Iviron 1985-1995. Actes de XΓnophon 1986. Kravari 1987, pp. 261-356. Actes du Pantocrator 1991. Gasparis 1991. Gounaridis 1993.

Exhibits per Monastery
Chronological Classification

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Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/athos/en/e218dm01.asp

Greek Documents

	Archival documents are probably the most important source of material for the historian and certainly the most important source for the study of the societies and economies of the past, in every country and civilisation which functioned on the basis of the written word. The same documents used at any given moment to shape or record events are those subsequently used by the historian to reconstruct and evaluate them. While narrative sources usually limit us to generalities, archival material lets us look at the details of daily life. Further, the material contained in archives is original, untampered with since the age in which it was first published, and thus generally more reliable than the narrative of any individual historian, who is usually writing after the events he is describing and so, voluntarily or involuntarily, frequently colours his account according to his personal political or ideological prejudices. After the papyri of the Hellenistic, Roman and Early Byzantine periods, there is no original material extant in Greece earlier than the end of the ninth century. After that date there are numerous archival collections, with the volume increasing steadily, of course, the nearer we come to the present day. For the Middle Ages, the documents are few in number and thus exceptionally precious; and these have been exhaustively studied. For the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the quantities of material are so great that an exhaustive study is impossible. The archives of the Athonite monasteries constitute the principal collection of original ninth- to fifteenth-century Byzantine documents that have come down to us. Other collections, naturally much smaller, are preserved at Meteora and in the monastery on the island of Patmos. There are also a number of original documents from the Byzantine administration in Lower Italy. Other Byzantine documents exist at various locations around the world, but these are exceedingly few in number. Our knowledge is however supplemented by documents existing in the form of copies, and particularly in monasterial codices, where medieval archivists copied the entire content of the archives of certain monasteries (notably those of the Makrynitissa Monastery on Mt Pelion, the Lemviotissa Monastery near Smyrna, and the Vazelon Monastery near the Black Sea). While all the monasteries on Mount Athos have their own archives, some are far more important than others. In certain monasteries, such as the Great Lavra and the Iviron, Vatopedi and Chelandari Monasteries, the Byzantine archives are extremely important, with over a hundred documents, many of exceptional importance and considerable length. In most cases, however, the Byzantine archives are relatively small, including no more than a few dozen documents; some, such as those of the Konstamonitou and Karakalou Monasteries, have only a few Byzantine documents, while others, such Stavronikita, Simonopetra and Gregoriou, have none at all. A monastery's archives contain documents relating to both the history and organisation of the foundation and of course to its assets. The internal regulations known as typika ( rules ), the wills of their abbots and the rare written decisions of monks in positions of authority are the main types of documents relating to the administration of the monastery and the spiritual life of its inhabitants. Mount Athos, however, with its central administrative authority of the Protaton, has ancient documents delimiting the monastic peninsula and typika regulating monastic life throughout the territory, especially in Karyes, starting from the celebrated Tragos signed in 972 by the Emperor John Tsimisces himself. A monastery's assets are mirrored in its archives. Records of books, icons and other treasures or tools give us an idea of the foundation's movable property. But we learn even more about its real property, the acquisition of which was always documented in writing. Deeds of sale, bequests, exchanges, adjustments, wills, long term tenancies, private legal documents of every description bring to life before our eyes the relations of monastery with private individuals and with other monks. Then there are the public documents, from the hands of emperors, senior officials, state functionaries, judges and ecclesiastical authorities from the Patriarch to ordinary priests, from the Protos of Mount Athos and the Synaxis at Karyes: they tell about relations between the monastery and the authorities, the taxes they paid, the privileges they enjoyed and how they won them, how they dealt with the claims advanced against them by lay persons and other monks. They refer to lands and estates both on Mount Athos and beyond it, in Chalkidiki especially but also in Macedonia, in the North Aegean (particularly the island of Lemnos), and in the cities: Thessaloniki, Serres, Veroia, Kavala, and above all Constantinople. Beyond the monastery's own assets, however, a monastery's archives will often contain documents dealing with financial transactions between laymen. When a property ended up on a monastery's roll, perhaps as a bequest, it was frequently accompanied by the entire file pertaining to its title, for this would be necessary in case of dispute. Thus, the Great Lavra has documents relating to imperial privileges granted to one Leon Cephalas, a military officer who lived in the penultimate decade of the eleventh century: these passed to the monastery together with the lands they describe, as a bequest from the man's descendants in the twelfth century. Or, a man who decided to retreat to a monastery would bring his personal papers with him, and these might well end up in the general archives, even though they were of no practical use to the foundation. This is how the Sultan's berat of 1483 appointing Symeon to the Patriarchate came to be in the Vatopedi Monastery, for that is where the Patriarch spent his final years. It has no legal value, for that would have ceased with the resignation of the beneficiary, but it is still a fascinating document. This mixture of documents is what makes the Athonite archives so extraordinarily important in the study of Greece's medieval history: they contain so much important material on the economy and the society of the period. The Xenophontos and Zographou Monasteries contain records of property acquired as pronoiai, thus giving us a glimpse of the principle method of payment of the armed forces in the later Byzantine period. A bill of sale in the Docheiariou Monastery tells us of magnificent private houses in twelfth-century Thessaloniki that had deteriorated and had been subdivided into small flats and shops. A judicial decision in the Iviron Monastery describes how agricultural investments and improvements were made in Thessaloniki in the year 1400. And the documents relating to privileges and tax exemptions are legion, indicating that from the twelfth century onwards social organisation was based on privilege. Apart from the Byzantine documents, the Athonite archives preserve a number of acts by the Emperors of Trebizond (Dionysiou Monastery), medieval documents from foreign rulers, and a few, generally insignificant, Latin documents: their main bulk, however, consists of Bulgarian, Serb and (later) Vlach and Russian documents. The contacts between the monastic peninsula and Orthodox Christendom expanded tremendously in the years following the thirteenth century, and are reflected in the archives. There are Slav documents, mainly in the Bulgarian Zographou Monastery, documents in Serbian in Chelandari, and documents in Russian in St Panteleimon. And there are other such documents in other monasteries as well, monasteries that once had contacts with Slav-speaking countries, or metochia (dependencies) in Roumania. There are also documents in Greek, issued by the fourteenth-century Serb rulers who had occupied Macedonia and Mount Athos, for that was the time when the Serb monarch had assumed the title of King and Emperor of Serbia and Roumania (that is, of Byzantium). Extant medieval Slav documents are even rarer than Byzantine documents, making those in the Athonite archives extremely important. The fourteenth century brought the Ottoman Turks to Macedonia, and by the fifteenth century they had made it theirs. Their presence as lords and masters of Mount Athos from then until 1912 is reflected in the monasterial archives. A large number of Turkish documents has been preserved, many of which date back to the time of the conquest and the fifteenth century, a period relatively poorly covered in the (otherwise extremely rich) Turkish National Archives. There are also numerous Greek documents from this period, mostly relating to monasterial property and to litigation with other Christians; ecclesiastical and private documents. Apart from their historical value, these are also of considerable linguistic importance for, in an age of limited literacy, they are written phonetically and thus document the evolution of the various dialects. While there are relatively few Greek papers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the eighteenth century on their numbers increase, reaching the thousands by the time we reach the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this period, however, the Athonite documents have lost the uniqueness of those dating from the Middle Ages, since similar collections exist in many other monasteries and in public archives in Greece. The study of the archives of Mount Athos has made substantial progress only in this century. The Parisian series Archives de l Athos is systematically publishing the medieval documents, and abridged versions of the post-Byzantine documents are being published by the Institute for Byzantine Studies in Athens. There have also been numerous isolated publications in periodicals and special editions. The bibliography below is far from exhaustive; it is designed to provide the reader with a guide enabling him to find his way around the Archives of Mount Athos. BIBLIOGRAPHY For older publications, see Manousakas 1963, pp. 391-414, and Oikonomides 1967, pp. 489-93. Principal editions of archives: Actes de Zographou 1907. Actes de Chilandar 1911. Actes de Chilandar 1912 [1915]. Actes de PhilothΓe 1913. Binon 1942. Actes de Kutlumus 1945, 1988. Manousakas 1963. Actes de Xeropotamou 1964. Nikolopoulos - Economidis 1966, pp. 257-327. Actes de Dionysiou 1968. Economidis 1970 (1) pp. 416-36. Economidis 1970 (2) pp. 437-58. Actes de Lavra 1970-1982, I-IV. Actes de Esphigmenou 1973. Actes du PrΥtaton 1975. Actes de Kastamonitou 1978. Economidis 1979, pp. 197-263. Actes de Saint-PantΓlΓΛmon 1982. Actes de Docheiariou 1984. Vamvakas 1985, pp. 105-53. Chrysochoidis 1985, pp. 7-104. Actes d Iviron 1985-1995. Actes de XΓnophon 1986. Kravari 1987, pp. 261-356. Actes du Pantocrator 1991. Gasparis 1991. Gounaridis 1993.
	Exhibits per Monastery Chronological Classification