On Mount Athos in Greece, hundreds of stone inscriptions carved into monastery walls over seven centuries still record the names, titles, and prayers of the powerful people who paid for the buildings. These texts are not merely decorative. They are public statements of political authority, pious generosity, and social ambition, carved in stone for an audience of monks, pilgrims, and rival patrons from across the Byzantine and post-Byzantine world. Yet no one has systematically studied them as a coherent body of evidence. This project will compile the first digital corpus of Athonite donor inscriptions from the 10th to the 17th centuries, analyse their language and imagery, and ask what they reveal about the motivations of donors—lay benefactors who wielded influence over one of southeastern Europe’s most important religious centres. The research is fundamentally curiosity-driven. It will produce an open-access digital resource for historians, art historians, and epigraphers, and will clarify a concept—patronage—that scholars often invoke but rarely define. By mapping networks of economic interest, church leadership, and intellectual exchange across centuries, the project could reshape how historians understand power and generosity in pre-modern Mediterranean societies. Similar fundamental work on medieval inscriptions has, in the past, overturned long-held assumptions about literacy, gender, and political authority.
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The monastic community of Mt Athos is one of the most important religious centres of southeastern Europe; the donor inscriptions still preserved in its buildings represent public statements of political authority and pious patronage. Their commissioners were active across the expanse of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine world and their reading audiences came from every corner of the Christian universe. Some of these texts were embellished by donor portraits, thus providing additional insights into patrons’ strategies of self-presentation. In addition, the inscriptions exhibit strong indications of orality. The inscribed invocations and commemorations echo actual prayers and orations recited in the presence of patrons, monastics, and pilgrims. By examining and understanding the displayed texts, the proposed project will provide exhaustive answers to the questions: What kinds of messages were promulgated by donor epigraphy? Who commissioned and executed the inscriptions? What kinds of viewing audiences did they envisage? The project’s ambition is also to disambiguate the elusive and frequently misunderstood concept of patronage: Who were donors and what can we learn about their motivations? Does their capacity as lay benefactors of a major spiritual centre reveal anything about the place of these individuals in, and about their impact on, the world? The project will: a. compile a digital corpus of Athonite donor inscriptions; b. analyse the texts; and c. elucidate broader issues of patronage in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean / Eastern Europe. The research will be structured in three Work Packages: 1. the collection of material during trips to Athos and the digital edition of the inscriptions; 2. the contextualisation of the inscriptions within their physical space and the historical framework, and 3. the discussion of the social phenomenon of patronage during one Workshop and one International Conference. The digital corpus will be published in open access mode and the proceedings of the Conference will be edited in a collective volume. The proposed project would generate comprehensive epigraphic data, which would map instances of development over consecutive historic periods (10th - 17th century). This evidence would provide the scope for a nuanced interpretation of the function of publicly visible texts within a sacred landscape. This will reveal wider networks of economic interests, church leadership, intellectual exchange, and patronage embedded within Mount Athos. By bringing together the expertise of the two PIs in Byzantine epigraphy and their multidisciplinary methodology combining history, art history, and literature, the project will address the donor inscriptions of Athos for the first time as public texts which established contact between patrons and audiences. The results of the proposed research would thus offer fresh insights into the issues relevant to other religious centres from a global perspective.
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