Post-Byzantine Archive of the Monastery of Patmos

The post-Byzantine archive of the Monastery of Patmos contains a significant number of archival codices and hundreds of loose documents relating to issues concerning the history of the Monastery from the late 15th century onwards, its dependencies, which were scattered throughout the Aegean, Crete, and even the Ionian Islands, as well as the community of the laity of Patmos. The Byzantine Research Department of the Institute of Historical Research, due to its traditional relationship with Patmos, is studying this important material and the project’s collaborators are working to make the best use of it. The archival material is primarily organized into folders according to dependencies. It contains abundant information on the organization of each dependency and its financial management, relations with the mother monastery, but also the balance that the monastery sought to maintain in the eastern Mediterranean, which after the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus (1571) came under Ottoman control. The aim of the project is to record and highlight this rich material, to publish and study archival documents and codices that offer unique information valuable to all researchers, and to use them to study the history of the mother monastery but also the history of its dependencies. Of particular interest are issues such as the internal organization of the monastery (koinobion or idiorhythmic), its relations with the Ecumenical Patriarchate, its economic activities, as well as the study of the daily life of the monks and the way in which they approached the Byzantine archival material.