The Slavonic Manuscript Heritage of the Zograf Monastery on Mount Athos ‒ Past and Present

Abstract

The literary treasures of the Holy Monastery of St. George the Zograf (widely known as Zograf Monastery) on Mount Athos, Greece, have attracted the scholarly attention for almost two centuries now. Built back in the X c., the Monastery has been inhabited by Slavic monks, predominantly Bulgarian in origin, for a millennium. Numerous medieval books have been taken by different visitors from the Monastery’s Library and “migrated”, mainly to the lands of the former Russian Empire. Despite that, due to the relative difficulties in terms of access, the Library and its manuscripts have neither seen proper cataloguing so far, nor have been studied to a sufficient extent. The present article makes an overview of several topics. First, it sketches the history of cataloguing attempts made for Zograf’s Library since XIX c. to contemporary undertakings. Second, it describes the current state of the Library’s repertoire, which is by far wider than expected until recently, and the formation of several teams with different fields of research in order to cover the whole range of thousands of hand-written books and documents spanning all over ten centuries. Third, the article traces the stages of the decade lasting (and still continuing) process of digitalization of the Zograf’s literary heritage and the attempts of providing its accessibility to the scholars – at least for its most valuable pieces, if not in total.