All posts by : admin

As do all the Athonite monasteries, the St Pavlo Monastery has a rich collection of archives, which are categorized on the basis of the language of each document. Thus, we refer to the Greek, Ottoman, and Romanian archives. In any case, documents in different languages have crept into each category through the centuries. Thus, in the Romanian and Ottoman archives, you will find a few Greek documents. The archives generally have gaps, despite no damage having been suffered from fires except for that of 1902, in which about 250 Slavic codices were known to have been destroyed.
The Greek archives
The Greek archives are divided into Byzantine, Post-Byzantine, and Recent. The Byzantine archives consist of about 58 folders, each of which contains one document. The 17 Serbian documents of the 15th century are included here, six of which are translations of the corresponding Greek documents. One Romanian and one Ottoman document are also included in this group. For the period from the beginnings of the Monastery until the end of the 15th century, 34 documents have survived – only four of which relate to the first phase of the history of the Monastery – while for the 16th and 17th centuries, there is only one surviving document.
The Post-Byzantine period is divided into twelve folders with a varied number of documents in each. The 18th century is represented by about 50 documents, the overwhelming majority of which are from the second half of that period. Among these are a few which relate to the metochia in Romania.
The Recent archives, which include documents of the 19th and 20th centuries, are organized in 196 large folders and another group of 41 small folders. The full classification of these documents has not yet been completed.
The Ottoman archives
The Ottoman archives contain twenty numbered folders, while five others include both Greek and Ottoman documents. In total, there are about 1,000 Ottoman documents, half of which date from the second half of the 19th century until 1912. It is worth noting that the oldest original Ottoman document within the Athonite peninsula and one of the oldest in the world – dated to 1386 – is included in the Monastery’s archives. There are around seventeen documents from the 15th century, while about 180 date from the 16th. About 200 documents come from the 17th, 18th, and the beginning of the 19th centuries, with the majority of the latter belonging to the last part of that century.
The Romanian archives
The Romanian archives consist of 994 documents, categorized into seven files. Chronologically, the documents are from the 15th-20th centuries, with the largest number – 525 documents – dating to the 19th century, while 100 come from the 17th century, and 357 from the 18th. Among these are a few documents in Greek.
Cataloguing the documents
The classification of the documents in the archives into files had originally been done by the monks and served the immediate needs of the Monastery. However, the reasons for the particular classifications, as well as the logic used for organizing the documents into files, are unknown to the contemporary researcher.
Based on the system of assigning numbers to each document, there is some support for the date of the first categorization of the documents to be set at the beginning of the 19th century, likely in the context of the general renovation of the Monastery by Anthimos Komninos.
A second categorization took place in the 1920s and 1930s when, because of the approproation of lands by the Greek government for distribution to refugees after the Asia Minor catastrophe, the Monastery had lost all its metochia and needed to have an overall picture of its documents.
Finally, in the 1960s, the (then) Librarian Theodosios the Elder organized the documents into folders for the first time, and tried to categorize them using a contemporary cataloguing system.
The cataloguing process for the Ottoman documents was completed in the 1970s by the National Research Institute for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Documents of the University of Crete, while around the year 2000, a Romanian researcher at the National Research Institute categorized and published the Romanian documents.
There is a wide range of document types, which came from a variety of different sources: The Monastery itself, individual monks, Athonite administrative bodies (e.g. the Holy Community), other monasteries, state or local authorities (Byzantine, Ottoman, Romanian), and private individuals – all are known to have executed or been recipients of documents preserved in the archives. The documents are most concerned with issues of ownership and taxes and loans, while a lesser number are related to political or spiritual issues.
The documents provide insight into the world of the monks: Their daily lives, the problems regarding survival which they had to face, and how they resolved them. Despite the gaps, the long chronological extent of the archives from the 11th century to the early 20th century creates a feeling of continuity. While reflecting the changes in the conditions of the Monastery, the documents also bring the alternating phases of political control of the region of Macedonia during each era – and their consequences – back to life.

When Barski visited Mt Athos for the first time in 1725, he visited the St Pavlos Monastery and, as he wrote, he found that ‘reading and singing of hymns [was in Bulgarian], and all the officials [at the Monstery] were Bulgarian’, while 20 years later, on his second visit in 1744, he observed that ‘nothing of that remains, apart from the Slavic library, where a large variety of different books, both printed and handwritten, are found.’ Almost 100 years later in 1837, the British traveller Robert Curzon wrote that he found in a small, closed room about 250 Serbian and some Bulgarian manuscripts, and only one Greek codice of the 12th or 13th century. He states that the Abbot of the Monastery gave him three Slavic codices which contained copies of the gospels as a remembrance of his visit to St Pavlos.
According to an 1888 inventory (which was updated in 1894) by Professor Sp. Labrou, there were 1,500 books in the library, 94 of which were manuscripts. At the beginning of the 20th century, a critical study of the history of the Athonite peninsula, its monasteries, and its monks, was written by the monks themselves, and was published in 1903. The St Pavlos monk Kosmas Vlachos mentions that at that time, the library had 94 Greek manuscripts, five of which were parchment and dated from the 9th-13th centuries, while the remainder (from the 14th-18th centuries) were of paper.
According to the late scholar and Elder Theodosios of St Pavlos (1901-1987) who served as Librarian at the Monastery for many years, the Athonite historians, copying from one another, report that the library of St Pavlos was destroyed during the great fire of 1902, something which is not true. On the contrary, according to the late Theodosios, all the Serbian and Slavic documents in total had been saved, and are an important legacy of the Monastery. What is likely to have happened during the fire was the destruction of 250 manuscripts, mainly Serbian and a few Bulgarian codices, which the Monastery had had for a long time (perhaps they were the manuscripts which Curzon had seen), and which were not mentioned by Professor Sp. Labrou in his late 19th century inventories.
At present, the library of the St Pavlos Monastery is housed in the south wing of the Monastery and is very well organized. It includes 494 manuscripts and about 20,000 printed books. Of the latter, the oldest is the grammar book of Chrysolora (entitled Erotemata (Questions)), printed in Venice in 1483.
Among the manuscripts, the most important is the parchment codice with the Acts of the Apostles, with comments written in the margins, dated to the 10th or 11th century. The library’s collection of music manuscripts is one of the largest on Mt Athos with 177 manuscripts, including an important codice of 1758 containing the Akathistos Hymn and the Kratimatario, works of the composer Theodosios of Chios, the hierodeacon and First Chanter of Smyrni.

The precious small works of art of the Monastery include a wooden diptych (from the end of the 13th century-beginning of the 14th) with 26 small portraits of the twelve Apostles, the four Evangelists, and other saints, and a portable wooden shrine icon, with a rare glass depiction of Christ Enthroned, together with the Prayer (i.e. the Δέηση, with the Virgin Mary, St John, and two archangels) set in a metal frame decorated with busts of the saints, a valuable work of a Venetian workshop dated to the end of the 13th century. Another small but impressive artefact is a wooden cross with carved depictions of the twelve Apostles, set in a brass base with Arabic inscriptions.
Apart from the sacred relics and the precious small artefacts, the St Pavlos Monastery has a very significant and valuable collection of Byzantine portable icons dating from the 12th century, and many to the later Byzantine-Palaiologian period. The oldest of these, a small icon of the Virgin Mary known as The Mirror («Καθρέφτης»), dates to the iconoclastic period. According to the Monastery tradition, it is said to have belonged to the Empress Theodora, the wife of Theofilos, who hid it behind the mirror in her bedroom, thereby giving that name to the icon. Its stylistic and iconographic details place it at the end of the 12th century.
Another icon, a double-sided one with the Virgin Mary, the Guide, bears the inscription ‘MOST BLESSED’ on the one side, and the Host of Archangels on the other, is dated to the end of the 13th century and attributed to an artistic workshop of Thessaloniki. It is considered an excellent example of the renascence of the Palaiologians.
Five icons survive from the second half of the 14th century: The icon of the Virgin Mary of the Sweet Kiss (Γλυκοφιλούσας, Glykofilousas), the so-called ‘Nisiotissa’ or ‘Mesonisiotissa’, the icon of St Georgios, The Virgin Mary, the Guide (known as «Φυλάττουσας» Filattousas, the Guardian), the two-sided icon with the Virgin Mary, the Guide on one side and the Crucifixion on the other, and the icon of the Virgin Mary the Merciful (Ελεούσας, Eleousas). All are works of high quality which were created in the workshops of artists in Konstantinople and Thessaloniki. In addition, the Monastery has a large number of icons (dated from the 15th-19th centuries) from icon screens and others used for veneration during religious events. All of these have very interesting stylistic and iconographic characteristics which reflect the influence of the Cretan style as it was interpreted by the artists in Moldovlachian workshops and by local artists.

Without a doubt, the most significant artefact of the monastery is the piece of the Holy Cross which bears an impression of the nails from the Crucifixion of Christ. It is one of the largest surviving pieces of the Holy Cross, and was donated by the Emperor Romanos I Lekapinos to the founder of the Monastery, St Pavlos. In addition, the Monastery has ten magnificently-crafted chests which contain segments of the Holy Gifts (gold, frankincense and myrrh) brought by the Magi to the infant Christ. The Holy Gifts were donated to the Monastery by the venerable Queen Maro, the daughter of the Serbian ruler Branković (1428-1456), who greatly helped the Monastery.
Among the treasures of the Monastery are the large number of miraculous and myrrh-emitting sacred relics belonging to more than 100 saints of the Orthodox church. The relics are kept in exquisitely-crafted reliquaries in the holy altar of the cathedral and are exhibited for veneration by the public during the celebration of the respective feast day of each saint.