When Dr. Richard Wittmann tells his Turkish colleagues about the nearly six-hundred-year-old slip of paper he saw at a monastery on Mount Athos, he says, they get goosebumps. The note, the size of a Post-it, is a simple congratulatory letter to an abbot, written in humble prose by none other than the man who a short time later would conquer Constantinople for the Ottomans.

This slip of paper is one of an estimated thirty thousand Ottoman Turkish documents stored among the twenty monasteries of Mount Athos, a semi-autonomous republic of Eastern Orthodox monks on a peninsula in northern Greece. Wittmann, who is deputy director of the Orient-Institut Istanbul, a German humanities institute of the Max Weber Foundation, is part of an international research team called the Manuscripta Ottomanica montis Athonis (Ottoman Manuscripts of Mount Athos), coordinated in part at Freie Universität, that has set out to digitize all of them. By the end of the ten-year project, the team hopes to have created not only a catalog with transliterations and translations of each one, but also the first AI-based tool that can read handwritten Ottoman Turkish. In the process, perhaps they will also be able to explain more fully why a future Ottoman sultan, ruler of one of the most powerful Muslim empires, showed such deference to a Greek Orthodox monk.

An Island of Peace

Mount Athos is home to an incredible trove of documents, some dating back to the ninth century CE. The monasteries that cling to its steep hills and cliffs house some of the oldest known copies of the Bible, along with illuminated manuscripts from throughout Europe.

Next to these religious documents are the bureaucratic detritus of nearly six hundred years of Ottoman rule. The Ottomans took control of that part of northern Greece even before Constantinople fell in 1453, and they maintained it until 1912, well past the Greek Revolution, negotiating the whole time with the Orthodox enclave instead of conquering it. The monasteries on Mount Athos owned, and still own, extensive property throughout the eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans and maintained trade relations with far-off places, such as Egypt. Since the official language of the Ottoman Empire was Ottoman Turkish, this was the primary language of communication with the outside world.

Ottoman Rulers Allowed Monks to Govern Themselves

The reason the monasteries of Mount Athos were able to preserve so many treasures has a lot to do with this collection of Ottoman-era documents. Throughout its one-thousand-year history as a monastic state, Mount Athos has always managed to maintain the privilege of at least some self-governance. Under the Islamic law of the Ottoman Empire, no non-Muslim state-like entity should have been able to exercise autonomy, and yet the monastic community at Athos managed to do just this, says Wittmann, who studied Turkish and Islamic studies at Freie Universität before his PhD at Harvard University and now leads the project. When the Byzantine Empire fell, the new Ottoman rulers allowed the monks to continue governing themselves, and even offered them official protections. Throughout the Ottoman period, the monks were able to continue their way of life, as they still do today. “The Byzantine Empire in a way has never ended there,” says Wittmann. It is like “a remnant state from a different age.”

Athos is notoriously inaccessible. It can only be reached by boat, and visitors, mostly pilgrims, must obtain visas that allow them only short stays. Only men are allowed to visit. The seclusion and autonomy of Mount Athos meant that the peninsula was spared the violence that plagued the region around it, allowing it to maintain manuscripts that would have been destroyed elsewhere.

While a catalog of most documents in other languages at Athos already exists, says Wittmann, almost no one has looked at its Ottoman Turkish documents. This collection includes a massive assortment of bureaucratic records: donations made to the monasteries, travel documents that monks needed to visit Istanbul, sales contracts, appointment deeds of monks and abbots (signed with the flowery seal of the Ottoman sultan), orders for medicine, records of sales, etc. They offer extensive insights into both the affairs of a large swath of the Ottoman Empire and into how Eastern Orthodox monasteries interacted with, negotiated with, and gained privileges from the Ottoman rulers.

Letters in Flowery Ancient Greek

In 2021, Wittmann received an envoy inviting him to an audience with the Ecumenical Patriarch (the leader of the Orthodox Church, which has its seat in Istanbul). When they met, he asked if it would be possible to visit Athos for research. The Patriarch affirmed that it would. At around the same time, Prof. Dr. Johannes Niehoff-Panagiotidis, head of Byzantine studies at Freie Universität, came to Istanbul as a visiting scholar at the Orient-Institut. Together, Wittmann and Niehoff-Panagiotidis took their first trip to Athos and began to dream up the project. Since then, it has ballooned into a major collaboration with universities in Germany, the US, Greece, and France.

Last August, the Orient-Institut signed an agreement with Freie Universität, which provides the “superstructure,” as Wittmann puts it. In the fall, the university put up the funds to hire Dr. Yasaman Rezaei, who will coordinate the project and the collaboration between its different partners. The researchers also had a somewhat more unusual ask: They needed to hire someone who knows how to write letters in flowery ancient Greek. Ancient Greek is the language of official correspondence of the monasteries of Mount Athos, and communicating with them requires communicating in their way. The university agreed and found funding to hire Nikos Papaioannou, who also works as a secretary in the archive of the Patriarch in Istanbul.

Technology at Just the Right Moment

Access to the monasteries for a handful of scholars, however, would not be close to enough to fully study the Ottoman Turkish documents there. The exclusion of women and the difficulty of reaching Athos mean that many experts cannot access the documents at all. Furthermore, at most universities, few people are left who can actually read Ottoman Turkish, which was written with a modified Arabic script. Even at Mount Athos, only one of the 2,000 monks can read Ottoman Turkish. “So, in a way, modern technology comes heaven sent, just at the right time,” says Wittmann.

Over the next two years, scanning teams from the genealogy organization FamilySearch will scan all of the documents, preserving them digitally and making them available outside of Athos. IT experts will use these scans to develop a handwritten text recognition (HTR) tool that will be the first to essentially read handwritten Ottoman Turkish and transcribe it. The volume of documents and centuries of variation within them, says Wittmann, is exactly what the AI-based tool needs to train itself.

Once all of the documents have been scanned and rough transcriptions have been produced, students, funded with stipends, will check all of the transcriptions and correct them in the first phase of the project, a process that will require three to five years.

In the end, the team hopes to produce a catalog that includes scans, transliterations, and translations of all of the Ottoman Turkish documents at Mount Athos. Researchers will be able to search for a term in this catalog and find every document in which it appears within seconds.

Rezaei, who recently finished her doctorate at Freie Universität under Prof. Niehoff-Panagiotidis, says she recently saw a prototype. “It was extraordinary. I really felt: What a pity I didn’t have something like this when I did my PhD.”