Very much along the lines of this congress’ theme, this Thematic Session proposes to examine how Byzantium was remembered on Mount Athos during the period of Ottoman rule. This memorialization of Byzantium encompassed many aspects, including: the preservation, reexamination and forgery of sovereign privileges issued by Orthodox rulers during the medieval period; the adaptation of medieval hagiographic vitae and new oral legends according to contemporaneous tastes; the reimagining of the Byzantine past in the Holy Mountain’s art and architecture; and continuing to commemorate the patrons, pilgrims and monks of centuries past. Of course, choosing which aspects of the Byzantine past were remembered also meant forgetting other parts of the Holy Mountain’s heritage. This certainly applied to the prominence of certain cultural groups that had once played an important role in the monastic center’s formation. The apogee of Georgian monastic life on Athos, attested by numerous manuscripts and material culture, was increasingly forgotten, even though the occasional traveler like Timothy Gabashvili (1703–1764) might show interest in exploring this legacy. Likewise, the memory of the Latin monastery on Athos, Amalfion, as well as Athonite interactions with the Medieval West more generally, faded, even as relations between Athos and the Catholic Church warmed in the seventeenth century, when the Jesuits were active on the Holy Mountain, even founding a Jesuit school at Protaton in 1635.
In the early 18th century, the monks of Zographou carried out a remarkable program of falsification that reveals not only their material pursuits but also the way they understood the origins of their monastery. Reusing late medieval Greek documents and golden seals of a Bulgarian, Byzantine, and Serb ruler, they produced three documents resembling the…
The paper deals with methodical issues concerning the methods of ethnic and/or prosopographic identification of persons mentioned in the extant lists of commemoration from orthodox monasteries of the Balkan peninsula. The material for the study is provided by the earliest Serbian book of commemoration from the monastery of Hilandar – Cod. Hiland. slav. 519, 15th–16th…
Commemorating the departed through prayer has been a central element of Christian life. On Mount Athos, this practice was reflected in the recording of the names of patrons, pilgrims, and monks in registers of commemorandi, forming networks of memorial prayer across the Byzantine world. Known as pomenik in the Slavic tradition and brebeion (βρεβείον) in…
Among the written sources concerning Mount Athos, various legends preserved in manuscripts dating from the 16th century and later stand out as testimonies to the ongoing process of remembering and identity formation of its monks during that period. Most of these legends were preceded by an oral phase that reached well into the Byzantine period;…