Radivoj Radić
Univerzitet u Beogradu
Filozofski fakultet – Odeljenje za istoriju, Beograd
rradic@f.bg.ac.rs

doi: 10.19090/cit.2023.42.54-65
No. 42 (May 2023), p. 54-65

Monastery of St. John the Apostle on the Island Patmos and its Library

Summary

John the Apostle and the Evangelist stayed on Patmos, the island in the Dodecanese Archipelago, in the Aegean Sea, at the end of the 1st century AD, where he wrote the Apocalypse, the last canonic book of the New Testament. A millennium later, in 1088, the cleric Christodoulos established a monastery on Patmos dedicated to this great personality in Christian history. In the Monastery of St. John the Apostle, which had a rather tumultuous history during the next nine centuries, there is one of the largest and richest libraries of the type, which represents a particular treasure not only for the Monastery or the Orthodox Christianity in general, but for science and researchers of the past from various scientific fields who come to the Monastery from all parts of the world. The library collections in Patmos Monastery can be grouped into three categories: codices, documents and printed books. Speaking of codices, it is a well-known fact that the initial Christodoulos collection, which, as it turned out, had been the nucleus from which the voluminous treasury of many different manuscripts evolved, consisted of 330 manuscript codices. Thanks to the constant inflow, the number of manuscripts kept growing in later periods, so that by 1890 the collection consisted of an impressive 855 manuscripts. The library also contains around 150 documents dating from the Byzantine period, and this number excludes many official and unofficial documents. On the other hand, the number of documents dating from the post-Byzantine period is considerably larger – over 13,000. The post- Byzantine collection of documents includes many of those written in foreign languages, such as Latin (68), Romanian (36), and Turkish (1,300). The library collection of the Monastery of St. John the Apostle also contains around three thousand printed books.

Keywords:

Patmos, Monastery of St. John the Apostle, library, Byzantine Empire, manuscripts, scriptorium, school, codices, documents.

Submitted: 7th February 2023
Accepted for publication: 25th March 2023

Monastery of St. John the Apostle on the Island Patmos and its Library by Radivoj Radić is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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