Unfortunately, a catastrophic fire which broke out on 24 February 1817 in the (then) newly-built southwest wing destroyed valuable documents in the archives of the Monastery and many artefacts, resulting in a significant gap in our knowledge about the historic past of the Monastery. During the following centuries, the library collection was altered either by the addition of new codices – such as the valuable, decorated Slavic parchment Book of the Four Gospels donated to the Monastery by the Moldavian leader Alexandros Lapusneanu – or the removal of existing ones – as in 1596, when the Monastery was forced, under difficult circumstances, to sell an unknown number of manuscripts to the Xeropotamos Monastery.
Today, many important post-Byzantine manuscripts can be found in the library.
