Typikon of the Monastery of the Theotokos Eleousa

The project entails the edition of the Typikon of the Byzantine Monastery of the Theotokos Eleousa, located near Strumitza in present-day North Macedonia and attested to have been founded in 1080. The Typikon is transmitted in a manuscript codex of the second half of the thirteenth century, now preserved in the Monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos, to which Eleousa became a dependency in 1250. The codex comprises copies of texts and various documents that illuminate the monastery’s legal and economic status. The first part contains eight documents from the period 1085-1160; the second transmits the principal Regulations of the monastery; the third presents an inventory of its movable property together with several additional documents.

The text was first edited in 1900 by Louis Petit on the basis of an earlier transcription by E. Miller, while partial editions had appeared in 1898 and 1896. Subsequently the Iviron codex was thought lost, until it was rediscovered by chance around 2016 within the monastery’s library; Iviron thereupon commissioned a new edition from K. Chrysochoidis in collaboration with Z. Melissakis and Aik. Mitsiou.

The Typikon is valuable because, through primary archival sources, it provides extensive information not only on the monastery itself but also on Byzantine monastic life more broadly, and on the prosopography and historical geography of the Strumitza region.