CONTRIBUȚII PRIVITOARE LA ISTORIA RELAȚIILOR DINTRE MĂNĂSTIREA ZOGRAF ȘI ȚĂRILE ROMÂNE DE LA ÎNCEPUTURI PÂNĂ LA MIJLOCUL SECOLULUI AL XIX-LEA (I)
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE HISTORY OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE ZOGRAPHOU MONASTERY AND THE ROMANIAN PRINCIPALITIES FROM THE EARLY TO THE MID-19th CENTURY (I)

Summary/Abstract: The study of the Romanian archive at the Zographou Monastery on Mount Athos has long been a coveted aspiration of our national culture, one finally fulfilled with the publication of the volume of documents in 2019. This long-standing desire was mainly due to the firm and enduring presence of Stephen the Great and Holy in the history of the Zographou Monastery. For this reason, the bibliography concerning the relationship between the Romanians and this Athonite lavra is quite extensive, although it was based on a limited number of documents from the monastery’s archive and on the hope that more would be discovered once the archive was opened.For the fifteenth century, eight Romanian documents were known – all originals – dating from 1420 to 1499. After examining the Romanian archive, it was found that their number remained the same: four were deeds of donation issued by the rulers of Wallachia and Moldavia to the Zographou Monastery, and four were internal acts issued by Alexandru the Good and Stephen the Great for members of the princely family, boyars, and monasteries in Moldavia. To these we add the exceptional document of August 22, 1416, which records the beginnings of the relations between the Zographou Monastery and the Romanian principalities, as well as the “travelling” document of January 31, 1500, intended for the now-disappeared Kaprule Monastery (in Karyes, near the Protaton), both of which were eventually hosted by the Zographou archive.Towards the late 19th century, several photographs of original documents from the Zographou archive reached the Library of the Romanian Academy from various sources, along with summaries and Greek-language copies of several dozen Romanian documents from the archives of the Athonite monasteries. They also included acts from Zographou, later published by N. Iorga in the Hurmuzaki Collection. In the twentieth century, based on those photographs, numerous Romanian historians (Ioan Bogdan, St. Nicolaescu, M. Costăchescu, etc.) published the Slavic documents in their respective volumes or in the collection Documents Concerning the History of Romania (Documente privind istoria României – DIR), Series A and B. Their most recent edition appeared in the national collection of historical sources, Documenta Romaniae Historica (DRH), Series A. Moldavia, and Series B. Wallachia, as well as in Moldova in the Age of Feudalism (vol. VI, Chișinău), which included the dedication act of the Căpriana Monastery, published from a photograph preserved in the remarkable collection of the Russian historian P. Sevastianov.In the twenty-first century, the oldest Slavic document from this archival collection was published by Георги Р. Парпулов and Ралф Клеминсън, based on a photograph reproduced in the volume by Mihail Kovacev (Михаил Ковачев), and it has since appeared in two Romanian editions. At the same time, the historian Cyril Pavlikianov edited the Slavic documents, publishing them in 2018 – though, for the most part, not from the originals but from earlier editions. That volume included thirty-seven documents, comprising Slavic acts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as from the seventeenth century (1601-98), many of which were previously unpublished.

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