Despite its long administrative tradition, the Greek Orthodox patriarchate created a distinct archival service only in the early twentieth century and placed it under the authority of the archigrammateas.12 Today, most of the material is hosted in a two-story building within the patriarchal complex and contains documents from the tenth to the late twentieth centuries. The pilgrimage series and the real estate series make up the initial nucleus of the records. The former contains mainly caliphal decrees and sultanic firmans referring to the privileges and rights of the patriarchate over the sacred shrines, which were classified twice or three times through the centuries, according to the marks on their back pages. These documents ended up in seven separate subseries with specific numbering and are now part of the VII.B series of the archives’ current inventory. The second series consists of property titles of monasteries, churches, rural areas and buildings, and is classified in the series from IV.A. to IV.Γ in the current inventory. It is evident why these two series were the most sensitive and valuable documents, and one can understand why the patriarchate was urged to establish an archival service to protect them.
When the archives were created in the early twentieth century, these two series were placed in the first chamber of the first floor. Responsible for this work was Dimitrios Ninos, a member of the local Greek Orthodox community who was fluent both in Arabic and Ottoman, assisted by a monk named Gorgias. In 1928, another monk named Andreas became the official registrar of the patriarchate and he mainly dealt with the establishment of the Great Estate Cadaster and with improving the organization of the two aforementioned series. At the same time, the patriarchate requested from its representative in Istanbul, Vladimiros Mirmiroglou, a person with a deep knowledge of the Ottoman language, the creation of an inventory containing the sultan’s orders, which were kept in the archive of the Hexarchy of the Holy Sepulchre in Istanbul and were at that time transferred to Jerusalem. In a report that Monk Andreas wrote in 1945, he informed the Holy Synod that he had created an index (kleida) of the real estate series and finally suggested the creation of a historical archive, the realization of which proved to be difficult at the time due to the lack of translators for the Arab and Turkish documents. The content of the archives was continually expanded through the post-World War II period. Initially, the incoming and outgoing patriarchal correspondence, kept in bound volumes along with a series of files of the administrative archive, were added and placed in two rooms of the upper story. A third chamber of the first floor was filled with files, cases, and registers from the economic and the real estate commissions. The existence of the Real Estate and the Pilgrimage series was gradually undermined because documents utilized in judicial cases were rarely returned to their original place. Archimandrite Kallistos, a former librarian of the patriarchate, tried in the early 1980s to reorganize these two basic series, without success. Later on, in 1983, the Center for Byzantine Studies of the Greek National Foundation for Research (EIE) organized a mission, headed by Chrysa Maltezou and Kritonas Chrysochoidis, to accommodate the economic series archives, but the task was not accomplished.
In response to these failures, the Historical and Paleographic Archive (IPA) of the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation intervened. The IPA was established in 1974 to create a microfilm (and later a digitized) database of Greek-language manuscripts and historical archives that are kept in major libraries and archives in Greece and elsewhere. It also aims to provide consultation and information about the study of Greek manuscripts in collaboration with archivists, philologists, and historians. Since the foundation of the IPA, more than 200 missions have been completed, during which almost 9,500 manuscripts have been digitized, as well as 20 full archival fonds (including the archives of the Catholic bishops of the Cycladic islands, the Greek Orthodox patriarchates of Alexandria and Jerusalem, the archdiocese of Cyprus, several monasteries of Mount Athos and Chalki Theological School), 150 codices and dozens of books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In parallel to the above missions, the IPA maintains a specialized library. It is currently completing an index of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Greek codices, and has organized weekly seminars on paleography since the 1990s. These seminars, well-known among Greek academic circles, have been widely attended by philologists, historians, and other students, and have trained generations of paleographers in Greece. The IPA publishes a monthly bulletin presenting news about their collection of digitized documents and archives.
The Agamemnon Tselikas Missions and Inventory, 1988–92
The director of the IPA, Agamemnon Tselikas, and his team, whether working alone or collectively, carried out nine missions over the course of 170 days from July 1988 to November 1991. The objective of these missions was to create an inventory of the patriarchal archives. This was an ambitious and demanding project, full of methodological and linguistic challenges that nonetheless resulted in an inventory published in Greek in 1992.13 One might imagine that the classification of the patriarchate archival material would come after the list of services and offices of the institution. However, the distribution of power and duties among commissions within the patriarchate was often fluid and at times very much centralized around the patriarch. Therefore, the classification according to bureaucratic procedure was not always respected and this is reflected to a large degree in the organization of the documents. Tselikas’ team tried to maintain the original classification of the material and add new categories whenever possible. Even though inconsistencies in the previous classifications were occasionally detected, these were left untouched in order to preserve the history of the archive itself. At times, there are gaps between registers or files, which are due either to the loss of material or to the fact that even when this work was underway, the patriarchal services had not yet organized the material. The team also tried to keep the original writing on the boxes, even though words were sometimes spelled incorrectly. This preserves an idea of what the bureaucratic mindset could have been at different times. The matching of labels with content was always checked and, whenever there was an inconsistency, this was mentioned. Many documents are dated according to the Muslim calendar and a few older documents according to the Byzantine calendar. Dates of both systems were maintained but the archivists also provided the date in the current Gregorian calendar. The two basic criteria for classification were the content and the form of the material. Concerning the content, Tselikas structured the material around five major themes: economy, real estate, pilgrimage, administration, and correspondence. As for the form, two different kinds of records were distinguished: the registers and the codices on the one hand, and the nonbound (or flyleaf) documents on the other. Thus, he created nine separate series and numerous subseries, which are indicated with codes combining Latin and Greek numerals.
The financial series (registers and codices) consists of twelve subseries whose codes range from I.A to I.IB. The first (I.A) contains 392 registers of an elongated shape, classified during the 1983 mission of the EIE. The majority dates from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. They are mostly economic and income registers, diaries and volumes regarding the patriarchate’s budget, expenses, and different sources of income. The following seven subseries (I.B to I.H) created during the IPA missions contain registers of income and accounting books of the patriarchate’s different services and especially of the economic commission and the Holy Sepulchre from the 1830s to 1920s. The eighty-seven items in the ninth subseries (I.Θ) refer to the auxiliary services of the patriarchate’s branches and several monasteries in Palestine, while the items starting in 1843 and ending in 1898 of the tenth (I.Ι) subseries refer to institutions outside Palestine. The eleventh series (I.IA) contains 243 boxes of receipts of the economic commission starting in 1882 and ending in 1909. Finally, the twelfth series (I.IB.), “Duplicates of Food Management,” consists of small duplicated sheets from 1890 to 1910, with the following inscriptions: “Usage of olive oil, soap, pulses, coffee, sugar, cod, octopus, potatoes, petrol and cheese, along with meat for the hospital, meat for the patriarchate, bread for the oil press of the Holy Cross and the harvesting of grapes.
12 Most information regarding the patriarchal archives comes from the introduction to Agamemnon Tselikas’ inventory: Agamemnon Tselikas, Katagrafi tou archeiou tou Patriarcheiou Ierosolymon [Register of the Jerusalem patriarchate archives] (Athens: Deltio tou Istorikou kai Paleografikou Archeiou tou Morfotikou Idrymatos tis Ethnikis Trapezas tis Ellados, 1992), 17–32.
https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20. ... 0-1940.pdf
