Transcripts dating back thousands of years to the Ottoman-era have been discovered by researchers at the medieval fortified monastery in Mount Athos, an Orthodox Christian community known as the epicentre of Eastern Orthodox monasticism.
These Ottoman-era transcripts were found amongst other centuries old works in several languages including Greek, Russian and Romanian.
Byzantine scholar, Jannis Niehoff-Panagiotidis says that it is impossible to understand the economy of Mount Athos and the society that was under the Ottoman rule without consulting the documents that have been discovered.
“Ottoman was the official language of state,” he said from the library of the Pantokrator Monastery, one of 20 on the heavily wooded peninsula.
Professor Niehoff-Panagiotidis said the oldest of the roughly 25,000 Ottoman works found in the monastic libraries dated to AD 1374 or 1371.
That is older than any known in the world, he said, adding that in Istanbul, as the Ottomans renamed Constantinople when they made the city their own capital, the oldest archives only go back to the late 15th century.
“The first documents that shed light on the first period of Ottoman history are saved here, on Mount Athos,” he said.
Source: ABC
