Monastery of Stavronikita at Mount Athos in Greece
The Holy Monastery of Stavroniketa is the smallest in size on the Holy Mountain. It is on the eastern side of the peninsula between the Monasteries of Iveron and Pantocrator, looking towards the Strymonic Gulf. Its history, like that of the other monasteries, has been a turbulent earliest history is lost in the depths of the 10th and 11th centuries. Uncertain evidence allows us simply to conjecture that a certain Nicetas or Stavronicetas Nicephorus, an officer of Tsimiskes, was the founder. The Monastery went into decline in the 12th century as a result of pirate raids and in the 13th came under the control of the Koutloumousiou Monastery, while in the 16th century it was already a dependency of Philotheou. In 1533, the Abbot of the Geromeriou Monastery, the priest-monk Grigorios, bought Stavroniketa from Philotheou and worked hard to revitalise it. By a patriarchal sigillium of the same year it was recognised as a stavropegic monstery. In 1541, the Ecumenical Patriarch Ieremias I did his very best to refound the Monastery and to see that it functioned once again, thus continuing the work of Grigorios. He endowed Stavroniketa with important metochia at Kassandra and on Lemnos. The Monastery returned to the coenobitic system. The katholikon had been completed for at least five years when its interior was decorated in 1546 with paintings of the famous representative of the Cretan School Theophanis and his son Symeon. The church is dedicated to St Nicholas. The refectory of the Monastery was also decorated by Theophanis, who was responsible for the depiction of the Twelve Great Feasts on portable the course of its history, the Monastery has suffered five times from fires - in 1607 a large part of its buildings was reduced to ashes. In the 17th century, Serban Kantakouzinos.
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Location: Monastery of Stavronikita at Mount Athos in Greece
Photo credit: © Yiannis Papadimitriou / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
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