20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

The Romanian monks from Athos MountainFlorin MarinescuInstitute of Neo-Hellenic Researches – AthensAn appealing subject for any historian who respects the truth and whowants to serve the truth, based especially on archive material. Fortunately inrecent years in Romania, corpora of documents have appeared from whichwe can extract lots of interesting aspects about the presence of Romanianmonks at Athos Mountain 1 . They can complete – or correct a lot of dataabout this theme which can be found in the (small) afferent bibliography 2 .I have extracted from the two works several themes which I will brieflypresent in the following pages.• The numerical situation of the Romanian monks, their presence inhermitages, and their grouping into Communities.• The relations between the Romanian monks and the Greek ones.• Their relations with Romania.1It is about two catalogues of documents, kept especially at the Archive of theMinistry of External Affairs, in Bucharest, which were published by the same authors,Adina Berciu-Draghicescu and Maria Petre. 1) Romanian schools and churches in theBalcanic Peninsula. 2004. Bucharest. Vol. 1 – Documents (1864-1948), 2006. Bucharest.Vol. 2 – Documents (1918-1953), 2) Romanian hermitages and cells at Athos Mountain.2008. Bucharest. Part 1 – Documents (1852-1943) and Part 2 – Documents (1852-1943).2A very important handwritten work must be mentioned, 16 volumes, edited by aRomanian monk, Irinarh Sisman, dedicated to the 20 athonite monasteries. A volume, thesecond one, is dedicated to the Prodromu hermitage, but it also contains other interestingdata relative to the presence of Romanian monks in athonite monasteries and Romanianhermitages. Interesting data about the presence of some Romanian monks at AthosMountain and about their hermitages can be found by whoever is interested in the manyRomanian books which are part of the collections of athonite monasteries such as SaintPavel (where 1200 printed works from the 17-20 th centuries are kept), Pantokrator, whereseveral hundreds of books are kept, Lavra, Kutlumus or Simonopetra, where almost 50such books are kept.