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.
