Monastery of St. Dionysius of Olympus

The Old Monastery was created around 1542 by the Monk Dionysius of Olympia , under the patriarch Jeremiah II (1522-1546). Probably the monastery was built on the site of an earlier Byzantine monastery, as evidenced by the found inscription of 1438. The saint, returning from Pelion , received permission from the local Turkish Bey to build a monastery. Moreover, the Turk handed over to him the surroundings of the monastery in the property. Dionysius of Olympia built cells, chapels and mills and took care of enriching the monastery with relics, icons (he himself was an icon painter), a library and wrote the canons of the monastery. Soon, many monks followed him to the monastery, due to rumors circulating about the acts of the Saint and his humble Christian life. 35 years after the creation of the monastery, Theodosius Zygomala (1544-1607) wrote to the Catholic missionary Stefan Gerlach: There, in Macedonia, on Mount Olympus, there is a monastery of the Holy Trinity with 200 monks. .

Saint Dionysius launched his activities in the wider region of Olympus, teaching, confessing and supporting the liberation movement, as confirmed by his biographer, Damaskinos Redinis. We have the date of the death of the Saint ( January 23 ), but it is not clear what year. The saint was buried in the left chapel of the monastery catholicon .

After the death of Dionysius, the glory of the monastery went beyond the borders of Thessaly and Macedonia and reached Russia. This is confirmed by the message preserved in the monastery from the Russian court, dated June 13, 1692 . According to the message, the monks of Olympus were allowed to collect donations in Russia, provided that the honest head of St. Dionysius was brought for worship. It should also be noted that many monasteries and temples of Northern Epirus were decorated with murals and icons of icon painters and monks of Olympus. Some initiations in the sacristy of the monastery are written in Romanian, which indicates that the glory of the monastery reached the then Danube principalities .

The history of the monastery in the 17th and 18th centuries remains in the shadows. In 1790-91, the monastery was destroyed by fire, as was noted in the correspondence of the monastery’s monks with the bishop of Campania (west of Thessaloniki) Theophilos (1715-1793). The monastery was one of the bases of the Clefs of Olympus, due to which it was repeatedly subjected to attacks by Albanians Ali Pasha and Turks. During the years of the Greek Revolution of 1821, the monastery was besieged by Turks and Albanians, and after a three-day siege, they were taken by them robbed and burned. With fire and looting, most of the library, relics and property of the monastery were destroyed. The abbot of the monastery Methodius (Paliuras) with 12 monks was taken to Larisa , where they were all hanged. In the following years of the War of Independence (1821-1829), the monastery remained abandoned.

In 1836, with the receipt of the Sultan firman, the monastery was rebuilt. During the restoration, as a result of an accident, the southern side of the monastery burned down, which in the same year was restored by the efforts of Abbot Damian.

The San Stefano Peace of 1878, which ended the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878), ignored Greek interests, provided for the creation of "Great Bulgaria", which, according to Dakin, "itself did not make much effort to obtain its freedom" ^[1] and the inclusion in the new state of the Greek, from the point of view of Greece and the Greeks, the cities of Macedonia and the Western Black Sea. The Greek population of Macedonia, who participated in all the Greek revolutions since 1770 and longed for reunion with Greece, came into motion ^[2] .

On February 15, 1878, 500 Macedonian revolutionaries who lived in exile in the Greek kingdom landed on the coast of the town of Litochoro with the ships Byzantium and Idra. The detachment, loudly called “Army of Olympus” ^[3] , was led by Lieutenant Dumpiotis, Cosmas , the descendants of the heroic family Lazos, Tolios and Yannakis Lazos, already 80 years old by that time, the veteran of the Greek Revolution of 1821 Zahilas, Georgios and Vlachavas Jr. Ammunition was delivered to the monastery of St. Dionysius. 2,500 men flocked there, wanting to take part in the uprising. There were not enough weapons for everyone and 2,000 fighters remained unarmed. The monastery became the first headquarters of the so-called "Provisional Government of Macedonia", of which Bishop Nicholas I of Kitra became a member. The rebels occupied Litochoro ^[4] .

After initial successes, with the approach of thousands of Turkish reinforcements, the rebels began to retreat. With the uprising suppressed, thousands of refugees, women and children from Litochoro flocked to the monastery. With the Turks approaching the monastery, the monks themselves destroyed church relics so that they did not fall into the hands of the Turks.

Despite the defeat, the Pierian rebellion strengthened Greece’s diplomatic position at the Berlin Congress, which revised the San Stefano Peace ^[5] . Macedonia was not included in the new Bulgarian state, which coincided with the position of other European states ^[6] .

The monks of the monastery assisted the Greek irregular units during the strange short-term Greek-Turkish war of 1897 and during the years of the Fight for Macedonia .

The Olympus region was liberated by the Greek army in 1912, during the First Balkan War . Until 1928, the monastery was stavropegy , that is, it was directly dependent on the Ecumenical Patriarch . In 1928 he transferred to the department of the patriarchal so-called. "New countries", essentially in the management of the Greek Orthodox Church ^[7] .

In June 1936, the First Panellian Mountaineering Congress was held in the monastery, in the presence of the honorary chairman of the Greek Mountaineering Union, Crown Prince Paul ^[8] .

During the triple, German-Italian-Bulgarian occupation of Greece (1941-1944), the monks supported the partisans of the People's Liberation Army of Greece . As a consequence of this, the monastery was completely destroyed by German troops (only the abbot’s monastery survived). After the war, the monastery was moved to the monastery compound of Skala, near Litochoro, which existed from the 18th century and is mentioned in the sigil of the Ecumenical Patriarch of 1753.

Today this male (new) monastery has 24 monks and is headed by archimandrite Maxim Kiritsis ^[9] . The catholicon of the Assumption of the Virgin was built in 1950. The icons of the iconostasis of the catholicon are made by the Greek artist and icon painter Fotis Kondoglu . In the monastery, in a recently renovated building dating back to 1860 , a new sacristy functions (Church Byzantine Museum), which was officially opened by the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew on May 29, 1999 . It contains church relics of great artistic and historical value, including icons of the 15-19th centuries, patriarchal sigilia, embroidered church clothes, patriarchal crosses, old manuscripts.

The monastery scrupulously follows Svyatogorsky canons and women receive communion in the outer catholics of the monastery (women’s access to the monastery is not allowed) ^[10] .

Not far from today's monastery is the area of ​​Mili (Μύλοι), which got its name from the water mill. The mill is still in working condition and a place for visitors to relax has been formed here. The monastery commemorates St. Dionysius on June 23 . Also on September 14, a local festival of the Exaltation of the Cross is held on the ruins of the old monastery of St. Dionysius ^[11] .

• Εγκόλπιο Ημερολόγιο , εκδ. Ιεράς Μητροπόλεως Κίτρους, Κατερίνης και Πλαταμώνος, 2007.
• Τουριστικός Οδηγός, Δυτική-Κεντρική Μακεδονία , εκδ. Explorer, 2003.

• Ιστορικό της Μονής .
• Ιερά Πατριαρχική και Σταυροπηγιακή μονή Αγ. Διονυσίου του εν Ολύμπω