In the winter of 1906/7 and in the spring and summer of 1912, Dragutin Anastasijević – an assistant professor of Byzantine Studies at the University of Belgrade – made two academic trips to Mount Athos as a research fellow of the Serbian Royal Academy. Evidence of these visits has been preserved in the documents of the Serbian Academy and the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Education of the Kingdom of Serbia, as well as in the formal and private correspondence between Anastasijević and the Academy or some of its members. This material is kept in the Archives of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA) and the Archives of Serbia in Belgrade. With the encouragement of its Secretary Ljubomir Kovačević and the consistent support of its President Stojan Novaković, the Serbian Royal Academy agreed to fund Anastasijević’s visit to Mount Athos with the task of photographing and copying Greek documents for Serbian historical records as well as to procure a photographic camera for this purpose. The Academy also supplied him with all necessary travel and research permits for Mount Athos and Anastasijević bought a camera in Munich; the camera was a new generation model based on the Eastman Kodak patent that used photographic film to capture images instead of glass plates. Anastasijević’s first visit to Mount Athos took place from late November 1906 to late February 1907 and the details of the visit are documented in the letters which he regularly sent to Ljubomir Kovačević from Mount Athos. Over the winter months of 1906/7 Anastasijević made around 500 photographs, mostly of Greek medieval documents of the Chilandar monastery. He also managed to photograph the Serbian charters of the Megiste Lavra monastery, but most Greek monasteries refused to grant him access to their material on account of their distrust of Slavs caused by the Russian expansion on Mount Athos and the Serbian and Bulgarian aspirations in Macedonia. Anastasijević’s intention was to publish a collection of Greek medieval documents of the Chilandar monastery, but he was hesitant to begin copying documents because the same task had been started by the Assumptionist Louis Petit, who had photographed the Chilandar documents in 1905. In mid-1911 the Academy asked him to return the photographs of Athonite documents and to expedite his efforts on the preparation of a publication of Greek documents of the Chilandar monastery. By early February 1912 he handed over all of his photographs and asked the Academy for financial assistance for another academic trip to Mount Athos to complete and verify the material for the planned collection. His request was granted and in late February he set off for Mount Athos via Constantinople. Having arrived in Constantinople, he learned that Petit’s collection of medieval Chilandar documents had been published the previous year. To make matters worse, in Constantinople he discovered that his camera was broken and was forced to stay there over three months. His mission on Athos, where he mostly stayed at Chilandar, was completed in mid-August. Despite his wish to have the Serbian Royal Academy publish the complete older Greek archives of the Chilandar monastery in a better and more comprehensive collection than Petit’s, the Academy decided to limit its publication to the documents that Petit had missed and to corrections and revisions of his collection. For all his troubles and the failure of his second mission Anastasijević blamed Jovan N. Tomić, one of the members of the Academy’s Board, and the confrontation between the two even resulted in a rather public dispute in the Belgrade press. Anastasijević’s collection entitled “From the Greek Archives of the Chilandar monastery” (Iz grčkog arhiva hilandarskog) and containing 15 documents unpublished by Petit was approved for publication among Academy editions, but was destroyed in the bombing of Belgrade in the Great War. In the end Anastasijević published only two documents out of several hundreds Greek Chilandar documents from the 11th to the 19th century that he had photographed on Athos. He also published the Serbian charters of the Megiste Lavra monastery. However, the most valuable and longest-lasting result of his stay on Mount Athos is certainly the collection of 500 photographs of Athonite documents kept in the SASA Archives, which can still be used for academic research and critical editions. In addition, many of these photographs can replace the originals that have been lost in the meantime. The appendix of the paper contains an edition of Anastasijević’s text “What Is Happening in Chilandar” (Šta biva u Hilandaru). The text was written in the latter half of 1912 but instead of being published, for unclear reasons it ended up in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Serbia. In this text Anastasijević offers a comprehensive overview of the difficult situation of the Chilandar monastery in the early decades of the 20th century, focusing his report on the monastery’s financial troubles and the bitter resistance of Bulgarophiles to its re-Serbification.
