It was 1980. Margaret Thatcher had already been Prime Minister for a year and a wave of female appointees was about to rock the deeply conservative nation of Greece. Anna Psycharopoulou rose to the presidency of the Council of State in the early 1980s, while Melina Mercouri became Minister of Culture in 1981. But before any of these women, in 1980, Chryssa Maltezou (Χρύσα Μαλτέζου) became appointed director of the Center for Byzantine Research a major research institute within the National Hellenic Research Foundation. Only six years early a military dictatorship often called the “Regime of the Colonels" was overturned by protests that was led by university students.
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 Meimaris's contact information was retraced 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 (since 1980, Tselikas has been head of the Historical and Paleographic Archive of the Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece).
Chrysochoidis's original focus in Jerusalem was more limited than Tselikas's. He produced a cursory listing of available manuscripts which could be used to help researchers like Quesnell and Meimaris. As Quesnell notes by the third day he had been "examining loads of other writings from Mar Saba itself from the 18th century." Indeed his notes show that Dourvas was bringing Quesnell dozens of indexed and precisely dated manuscripts from the 17th and 18th centuries. We know now the "indexing" of the manuscripts had been accomplished by the Dourvas, but the dating was by the team from the E.I.E.
Since Dourvas was trying to prove to Quesnell that the document was authentic, he must have consulted the list that Chrysochoidis and his team established two years earlier and retrieved the appropriate documents.
The only difference with Meimaris's research efforts in the same year was that Meimaris was from the E.I.E. and likely brought a copy of Chrysochoidis's catalog and, being a native Greek speaker and reader, could easily direct himself through the needed material. The end result in his 1984 published work, was a table of Cypriot manuscripts often with specific years and months, but also more general ranges and at least on a few occasions no dates at all. Yet even here Meimaris makes sure to reference the E.I.E. catalog as the source for the information.
When the Quesnell notes were uncovered in 2015, it was naturally assumed by the authors of the study that "the photos" which Dourvas gave to Olympiou and Olympiou to Charles Hedrick and published in the journal the Fourth R were assumed to be the ones that Quesnell documents he had Dourvas take in 1983. After all, why would anyone have imagined that there were two sets of photos of a manuscript since Morton Smith discovered it in 1958? Moreover, it was assumed at the time of the publication of Hedrick's article that the two sets of photos that Dourvas gave to Olympious were homogenous. Hedrick notes that Dourvas initially "gave black and white photographs of the manuscript of the Clement letter to Olympiou, who later gave copies to me. Subsequently, Olympiou acquired color photographs of the manuscript from Kallistos and loaned them to me in June of 2000 for this article."
Hedrick's color photos certainly look identical to ones taken by Quesnell in 1983. But are the original photos Hedrick received merely black and white reproductions of the same images he later received in color? It is worth noting that Quesnell never requested either color or black and white prints, only negatives or slides. Indeed the fastidious Quesnell documents a note from Dourvas from September 5, 1983 where is sending negatives to Quesnell:
Why did Dourvas possess processed photographs from the exclusive collection of slides that now populate the Smith archives? Dourvas obviously commissioned copies for himself without Quesnell's knowledge from Garo Nalbandian the local photographer he used.
There is one further clue that emerges from Maltezou's published writings in 1980, coinciding with the efforts to start photographing and cataloging the Jerusalem Patriarchal holdings. After referencing her department's effort to "microphotograph" manuscripts, Maltezou adds that
After referencing her department’s effort to “microphotograph” manuscripts, Maltezou adds that the publication of catalogues was itself constrained by institutional realities, especially those tied to ownership, scholarly priority, and the hybrid relationship between Church and state research bodies in Greece. What emerges from her remarks is not negligence or oversight, but a deliberate framework governing access. The Centre for Byzantine Research, under her direction, explicitly recognized that reproduction rights remained with the originating institutions—monasteries such as Mar Saba Monastery, Mount Athos, or the libraries of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem—and that these institutions were not passive repositories but active stakeholders in the control and mediation of their own archival heritage.¹
This point cannot be overstated. The very logic of Western academic cataloguing—where publication, dissemination, and reproducibility are treated as normative endpoints—was never fully operative in the Greek context of the late twentieth century. Instead, Maltezou’s statement reveals a system in which cataloguing could exist in a provisional, even intentionally unpublished form, serving internal scholarly use rather than public circulation. The unpublished 1981 catalogue, compiled under the supervision of Kriton Chrysochoidis, thus fits squarely within this model. It functioned as a working instrument, designed to facilitate controlled access for affiliated researchers rather than to establish a definitive, publicly accessible inventory.²
Moreover, Maltezou’s insistence that “the Centre’s researchers have absolute priority” in the scholarly exploitation of certain materials underscores a competitive and protective dimension to the enterprise. In effect, catalogues were not neutral bibliographic tools but strategic assets. To publish them prematurely would have meant relinquishing intellectual control over materials that had only just been identified, photographed, and partially organized. This helps explain why scholars like Quesnell, working outside the institutional framework, experienced the archives as both highly structured—thanks to the indexing and dating efforts of the E.I.E. team—and yet paradoxically opaque, lacking any officially distributed guide to that structure.³
At the same time, Maltezou gestures toward a broader international concern: the avoidance of duplication in microphotography projects. Here again, cataloguing serves a function internal to a network of cooperating institutions rather than the general scholarly public. The catalogue becomes a node in an information economy shared among research centers, not a publication intended for wide dissemination. This explains the otherwise baffling situation in which a multi-year effort to document the manuscripts of the Jerusalem Patriarchate resulted in a substantial but unpublished register. It was not that the work lacked value or completeness, but rather that its value was conceived differently—embedded within institutional privilege, archival sovereignty, and the controlled circulation of knowledge.
Seen in this light, what initially appears “crazy”—that five years of cataloguing would yield no published list—is in fact entirely consistent with the methodological and political constraints articulated by Maltezou herself. The unpublished catalogue was not a failure of the project but its logical outcome. It was a tool of access, not a product of dissemination; a mechanism of scholarly control rather than of open communication.
With the publication in 1992 of Tselikas's catalog of manuscripts of the Jerusalem Patriarchate, the partial catalog of 1981 was forgotten. Nevertheless we can piece together a lot of the context for Dourvas's strange statements regarding the final fate of the manuscript. Our last reference to the continued existence of the manuscript still being accessible is in November 1984, when Per Beskow was told that the manuscript could not be produced because it had been sprayed with insecticide. This was not an isolated explanation. Six months earlier, Anders Hultgård had reportedly been given the same reason when asking to see a different manuscript. The repetition matters: it makes the claim sound less like an ad hoc excuse invented for the Morton Smith volume and more like a standing explanation used by the library when manuscripts were unavailable because of conservation or pest-control treatment.
Dourvas indicated to Olympiou that the manuscript was still there when he left his post at the Jerusalem Patriarchate, something he reiterated to me four years before his death in 2016. Nevertheless there is no evidence that he saw the manuscript after 1990. The insecticide issue is interesting because of his drawing Quesnell's attention to worm holes in the manuscript a year earlier as well as his consistent strange use of the verb "repair" with respect to manuscripts.
