The Medieval South Slavic Documents in the Athonite Archives

Živojinović, Dragić (2019) The Medieval South Slavic Documents in the Athonite Archives. In: Lire les Archives de l’Athos: Actes du colloque réuni à Athènes du 18 au 20 novembre 2015 à l’occasion des 70 ans de la collection refondée par Paul Lemerle. Collège de France – Institut d’Études byzantines – Association des Amis du Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, Paris, pp. 579-606. ISBN 978–2–916716–68–8

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Abstract

Charters are amongst the most important documentary sources. Their data are invaluable for the investigation of medieval past because they enable research in the area of political, economic, cultural, and religious history, and very often for specialized prosopographic studies. When it comes to the history of the Serbs and Bulgarians, Mount Athos is one of the most significant sites for the safekeeping of such sources. From all extant documents stemming from the chanceries of Serbian and Bulgarian authors, 33% of the former and 28% of the latter are preserved there. It should be noted, though, that the Serbian documentary fund is 20 times richer than the Bulgarian. This paper comments upon the results achieved so far in the domain of archaeography, keeping track of this pursuit through the following phases: 1. First travelogues of pilgrims and learned men of the Enlightenment; 2. Reports of Russian archaeographic expeditions and prominent individuals (1840’s–1880’s); 3. Begginings of South Slavic scholarly historiography and first domestic editions of charters; 4. Work of the Slavistic centre in Vienna and of its South Slavic disciples; 5. Vizantijskij vremennik and the launching of Actes de l’Athos; 6. Heating up of the publishing activities between the World Wars; 7. From the end of the World War II to the present day, with special reference to critical editions, such as Archives de l’Athos and some other individual accomplishments. Bearing in mind that both Serbian and Bulgarian diplomatics still hasn’t managed to publish its comparatively small corpora of charters within one all-encompassing collection, and knowing that digital information technologies are increasingly entering the domain of presentation of documentary heritage, a question arises as to whether to fullfil such a task primarily in a non-traditional, digital manner. Simple, swift and dependable approach to digitised data would notably augment the use of diplomatic sources in research of many facets of medieval Bulgarian and Serbian past

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