Documents in Athos reveal relations with Ottomans

"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.

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.

Even before that, Niehoff-Panagiotidis added, a sultan issued a mandate laying down strict punishment for intruders after a band of marauding soldiers engaged in minor thieving from one of the monasteries.

“It’s strange that the sultans kept Mount Athos, the last remnant of Byzantium, semi-independent and didn’t touch it,” he said. “They didn’t even keep troops here. At the very most they would have a local representative who probably stayed at (the community’s administrative center, Karyes) and sipped tea.”

Another unexpected revelation, Niehoff-Panagiotidis said, was that for roughly the first two centuries of Ottoman rule no effort was made to impose Islamic law on Mount Athos or nearby parts of northern Greece.
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The community was first granted self-governance through a decree by Byzantine Emperor Basil II, in 883 AD. Throughout its history, women have been forbidden from entering, a ban that still stands. This rule is called “avaton” and the researchers believe that it concerns every form of external administrative or secular intervention that could affect Mount Athos.

Father Theophilos, a Pantokrator monk who is helping with the research, said the documents show the far-flung influence of Mount Athos.

“Their study also illuminates examples of how people can live with each other, principles that are common to all humanity, the seeds of human rights and respect for them, democracy and the principles of social coexistence,” he told The Associated Press."

Source https://apnews.com/article/greece-europe-middle-east-religion-24d0318142...