Four days had passed since the raid, when, in a letter dated March 31, 1917, the prefect of Drama, Nikolaos Bakopoulos, asked the Greek diplomatic delegation in Sofia to help find the stolen property. As he mentioned, on the night of Good Monday, 60 armed men broke in. Holy Monastery of Panagia Eikosifonissa on Mount Pangaiomonks and shepherds were locked in ovens, and the two elders were beaten mercilessly to show them where they kept precious relics. They seized rare manuscripts from the monastery library, loaded their booty onto 24 mules, and left unhindered. “This is a national treasure that even the Turkish invaders respected for centuries,” Bakopoulos wrote in his letter at the time. Decades later, three of these manuscripts were discovered during renovations in Manhattan auction house and are already on their way to repatriation.

They were sold in 2008. Swann Auction Galleries to a manuscript dealer in New York who returned them two years later and got his money back because he suspected it had been stolen. Since then, the manuscripts have been lying in a plastic bag, forgotten on a shelf in the office of the head of the financial department of the auction house. It wasn’t until January 17, 2023, after the site had been cleared for renovation, that the house’s new expert, Devon Eastland, became aware of their existence. “I wasn’t working here when they were sold and returned. Once I received them, I had no doubts,” he tells you. her telephone connection with “K” Eastland and explains that he immediately contacted attorney Giorgos Tsougarakis, General Counsel for the Archdiocese of America, regarding the case. “It is important that anyone in this position always does the morally right thing,” adds Eastland.

The perpetrator was Vladimir Sis, who covered the Balkan Wars for the Czech newspaper Narodni Listy.

As she says, without naming the name of the previous owner, the manuscripts ended up in an American auction house from the Czech Republic. This reference to an origin story does not seem to be accidental. The central figure in the confiscation of manuscripts was the native Czech Vladimir Sis, who covered the Balkan Wars for the Czech newspaper Narodni Listy and settled in Bulgaria. His name is not mentioned in this letter from Bakopoulos, but according to other sources, he appeared at the monastery of Eikosiphonissa three months before the raid by Bulgarian soldiers, posing as an archaeologist and professor at Sofia University, and asked to see rare objects in his monastery. collection . The ensuing invasion and the initial transfer of booty to Bulgaria took place in the context of an attempt to de-Hellenize the region. In 1919 Sis allegedly sold some of the loot in Frankfurt, and his wife did the same with the rest of the items in Prague.

her problem return of manuscripts occupied the Greek side for decades. December 4, 2015 Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in a letter to Princeton University, he demanded the repatriation of four relevant relics that ended up in the library of the American institution. He mentioned that the monastery of Ikosifonissa was founded in the 5th century AD. and that by the 18th century it contained 430 valuable religious manuscripts. He also stressed that under the Neigi Treaty, Bulgaria had to hand over all the treasures it seized from other states. The Bulgarian side returned 259 manuscripts to Greece, which is much less than the total number of stolen ones. Finally, on December 13, 2018, Ecumenical Patriarch Bishop Bartholomew, the Eikosifonissa Monastery and the Diocese of Dramatic Representation, represented by New York lawyers George Tsogarakis and Eric Blumenfeld, filed a lawsuit in the United States against Princeton University demanding the repatriation of religious manuscripts. “Based on the information available to us, we have not found any evidence to conclude that the manuscripts in our possession were stolen during the First World War or otherwise wrongfully removed from the possession of the Patriarchate.” then declared “K” Princeton representative. The case is still ongoing.

Last Friday, three manuscripts were donated by Swann Auction Galleries to the Archbishop of America, Mr. Elpidophoros, in a ceremony held at Ground Zero, St. Nicholas Church in Manhattan. The Archbishop of America is expected to deliver them to the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople in May.