Monastery manuscripts tell new story of Ottoman rule
MOUNT ATHOS, GREECE >> A church bell sounds, the staccato thudding of mallet on plank summons monks to afternoon prayers, deep voices are raised in communal chant. And high in the great tower of Pantokrator Monastery, a metal library door swings open.
There, deep inside the medieval fortified monastery in the Mount Athos monastic Orthodox Christian community, researchers are for the first time tapping a virtually unknown treasure — thousands of Ottoman-era manuscripts that include the oldest of their kind in the world.
The libraries of the selfgoverned community, established more than 1,000 years ago on northern Greece’s Athos peninsula, are a repository of rare, centuries-old works in several languages including Greek, Russian and Romanian.
Many have been extensively studied, but not the Ottoman Turkish documents, products of an occupying bureaucracy that ruled northern Greece from the late 14th century — well before the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, fell to the Ottomans in 1453 — until the early 20th when the area became Greek again.
Byzantine scholar Jannis Niehoff-Panagiotidis says it’s impossible to understand Mount Athos’ economy and society under Ottoman rule without consulting these documents, which regulated the monks’ dealings with secular authorities.
“Ottoman was the official language of state,” he told The Associated Press from the library of the Pantokrator Monastery, one of 20 on the heavily wooded peninsula.
Niehoff-Panagiotidis, a professor at the Free University of Berlin, said the oldest of the roughly 25,000 Ottoman works found in the monastic libraries dates to 1374, or 1371. That’s older than any known in the world, he said, adding that in Istanbul, as the Ottomans renamed Constantinople when they made the city their own capital, the oldest archives only go back to the late 15th century.
“The first documents that shed light (on the first period of Ottoman history) are saved here, on Mount Athos,” he said, seated at a table piled with documents and books. Others, the more rare ones, are stored in large wooden drawers.
These include highly ornate Sultans’ firmans — or decrees — deeds of ownership and court decisions.
“The overwhelming majority are legal documents,” said Anastasios Nikopoulos, a jurist and scientific collaborator of the Free University of Berlin who’s been working with Niehoff-Panagiotidis on the project for the past few months.
And the manuscripts tell a story at odds with the traditional understanding in Greece of Ottoman depredations in the newly-conquered areas, through the confiscation of the Mount Athos monasteries’ rich real estate holdings. Instead, the new rulers took the community under their wing, preserved its autonomy and protected it from external interference.
“The Sultans’ firmans we saw in the tower ... and the Ottoman state’s court decisions show that the monks’ small democracy was able to gain the respect of all conquering powers,” Nikopoulos said. “And that is because Mount Athos was seen as a cradle of peace, culture ... where peoples and civilizations coexisted peacefully.”
Nikopoulos said that one of the first actions of Murad II, the Ottoman ruler who conquered Thessaloniki — the closest city to Mount Athos — was to draw up a legal document in 1430 protecting the community.
“That says a lot. The Ottoman sultan himself ensured that the administrative system of Mount Athos was preserved and safeguarded,” he said.