The precious Byzantine treasure of a thousand years ago is found by Greece in a century, and in a few days it will return to its “home”. This is a Byzantine handwritten gospel that was kept in the monastery of the Theotokos Eikosifinissa in northern Greece and has been used for religious purposes for centuries. The monastery was sacked twice by the Bulgarian army, during the Balkan Wars and during World War II. and as archaeologists with knowledge of the period told K, many of its relics were looted.

The monastery of Eikosifonissa, located on Mount Pangeo, was founded in the 6th century. AD. from a true German. He had constant spiritual radiation in post-Byzantine times and was associated with the ecumenical patriarchs. By the 18th century, Panagia Eikosiphonissa, also known as the monastery of Kosinitsa, had amassed a remarkable collection of 1,300 codices, including 430 precious manuscripts.

One particularly rare historical relic is a gospel that was returned to the Greek Orthodox Church in the United States from the Museum of the Bible in Washington just two days ago, according to The New York Times. A representative of the Holy Metropolis of Drama confirmed the return of the relic to “K” and a program for its return to the monastery to which it belongs will be officially announced in the coming days.

This is a handwritten Byzantine gospel captured by Bulgarian troops from a monastery in Drama in 1917.

The decision of the Museum of the Bible to repatriate the manuscript acquired by its founders at Christie’s auction in 2011 has not only substantive but also symbolic significance, as it practically confirms the desire of a particular museum to return to the rightful owners the objects contained in its collection, the origin of which, after years of investigation, turned out to be doubtful – among the acquisitions in question, there are also works from Mesopotamia and Egypt, the NYT said. It is a policy that restores the injustice of the ages, and museum spokesman Geoffrey Kloas expressed his hope in the same publication that the return of the special code would encourage other institutions to return stolen manuscripts to the monastery.

Thus, a major step has been taken to justify a long-standing request by the Greek Orthodox Church to Princeton University to return five more Byzantine-era manuscripts that many scholars believe were stolen by the Virgin Mary Ikosifonissa. In particular, in a letter to the university dated 2015, the Ecumenical Patriarchate asks for the repatriation of the “Kosinitsa manuscripts to the monastery, where they will be kept, preserved and made available to the public for study and visits.”

As stated in the same letter, Bulgarian troops invaded the monastery on March 27, 1917 and looted the library. All manuscripts were transported to Sofia during the Second Balkan War. In 1923, under the Treaty of Neige, Bulgaria ceded its territories in Thrace to Greece and was obliged to return to the country, as well as Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Romania, all items stolen during the war. Under the terms of the treaty, Bulgaria returned 259 manuscripts and other relics to Greece, but there were fewer of them than those stolen. Since then, many treasures have been sold to libraries and collections in Western Europe and the United States.

From the 1930s, and at the suggestion of the then director of the National Library of Greece at the Fifth International Conference of Byzantines, scholars and government officials began a multi-year campaign to find and promote the return of these highly valuable relics.