When the colonels took power in 1967, they moved quickly to control the Greek Orthodox Church by removing the sitting archbishop and installing Jeronymos I of Athens, who was acceptable to the regime. Under his leadership, the Church’s top hierarchy cooperated publicly with the junta, echoed its ideology of a “Greece of Christian Greeks,” and largely avoided criticizing political repression, resulting in clear institutional alignment between the Church leadership and the military government. In the 1980s, under Andreas Papandreou, the secular government pursued reforms that challenged the Church’s traditional influence. These included changes to family law (introducing civil marriage as a full alternative to religious marriage) and broader efforts to secularize aspects of public life. The Church resisted these moves, seeing them as an erosion of Greece’s Orthodox identity.
Born outside of Greece in Alexandria, Egypt, Chryssa Maltezou, had a broader, more Western and ultimately scientific outlook than many of her contemporaries. She studied at the University of Mediterranean Studies of Aix-en-Provence with a scholarship from the French Government. She completed her postgraduate studies at the Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies of Venice as a scholar of the Academy of Athens. She received a diploma from the Corso di Perfezionamento of the University of Padua and a degree from the School of Palaeography, Archival Studies and Diplomacy of the State Archives of Venice.
Under her leadership, Kriton Chrysochoidis (Κρίτων Χρυσοχοΐδης) began the process of supplementing the great cataloging efforts of the late nineteenth century. In two missions to Mount Athos in 1980, for instance, Chrysochoidis politely references the organizational chaos of archives. Most of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine documents, once displayed in glass frames on the monastery treasury walls, were later removed and reorganized into individually numbered cardboard folders stored in a wooden cabinet; the same process was applied to the older Slavic documents, and the entire effort was carried out by the monastery’s librarian, the monk Theodosios.
Chrysochoidis went through a small pile of 18th-century documents, pulled them out, and sorted them into folders by topic, sometimes stretching the timeline into the 19th century when it made sense (like with patriarchal letters up to 1839). While doing that, they noticed a mess—older material, often just modern copies of earlier documents, had been mixed in with the newer archive. So they pulled those out too, separated them, and either gave them their own folders or stuck them where they actually belonged. But they didn’t bother changing the numbering system the librarian Theodosios had already put in place—they just worked around it. Chrysochoidis ultimately created a table which appears in his 1981 published work where he assigned specific years and months (wherever he was able) to supplement the pre-existing cataloging effort.
All of this serves to answer the question first raised by Quesnell in his 1983 notes (and subsequently Huller and Gullotta in their 2017 paper on the subject of his notes) as to the identity of the scholar who identified the dates of this and presumably all of the manuscripts which Dourvas brought to Quesnell:
The notes are clearly meant to be read "there is a note on a separate slip (of paper) in the MS folder and saying '1672'" (footnote) "BY WHOM?" i.e. by whose expertise, authority or instrumentation was the date established? We now know the answer. Kriton Chrysochoidis.
The key to unlock this mystery was uncovering Yiannis E. Meimaris's Neophytos the Cypriot and other Cypriot authors, published in Theologia 55 (1984), pp. 1131–1143. For his research on scribes and owners of Cypriot codices in the Library of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Meimaris followed much the same regimen as Quesnell in likely the same year. Meimaris and Quesnell might have sat in the same desk or one next to the other, receiving dozens of dated and indexed manuscripts from the same man over many weeks from the same man. As Meimaris notes in his paper "I wish to express my thanks to the librarian and archivist of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Archimandrite Fr. Kallistos Dourvas, who willingly assisted me during the days I worked there, as well as to express my admiration for the work which he zealously carries out in the Library and the Archive of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem."
Another commonality is that both men undoubtedly had books by Morton Smith in front of them. Meimaris identifies his use of "the five-volume work of A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus, Jerusalem Library 1891–1915; the work of Kleopa M. Koikilidis, Remains of Manuscripts of the Jerusalem Library 1899 the work of Morton Smith, Greek Manuscripts in the Monastery of St. Sabbas, translated from English by Hieromonk Konstantinos Michailidis, Nea Sion 1960 and he also cites the use of a work that is key to our presentation, a catalog described by the author as a "comprehensive register of supplementary cataloguing of manuscripts of the Jerusalem Library, compiled by collaborators of the Center for Byzantine Studies of the National Hellenic Research Foundation (E.I.E.), in the summer of 1981 (unpublished)."
Kriton Chrysochoidis's instrumentality in the creation of this unpublished volume only came to light when I traced Meimaris's contact information to the now re-baptized name of the E.I.E. as the Institute of Historical Research. I was infomed by Meimaris that the report from the team that was headed by Chrysochoidis in 1981 sent a report to Chrysa Maltezou when she was director of the organization. Their focus was rather limited and the cataloging of all the contents of the massive holding of the Jerusalem Patriarchal Library was ultimately taken up by Agamemnon Tselikas in 1988 and published in 1992 by the same organization which he would ultimately head.
