Any collector of
Imperial Russian postal history who has gone through dealer boxes will at some
point have come across money letters from Russia to Mont Athos, one of the
peninsulas south of Thessaloniki and at the time part of the Ottoman Empire.
They will be dated between the early 1870s and the early 1900s, after which the
postal money transfer (Perevod)
method replaced them.
The money letters will
be addressed to three possible destinations: the skete [monastery] of St Andrew
(Andreeveski Sikt/Skete), the kellion
[cell] of St John Chrystostomos [Kellio
St. Ioanna Zlatousta], and perhaps less frequently to the skete of the
Prophet Elijah [Ilinksi Sikt/skete].
These were all Russian Orthodox establishments, recently created with
extensive support from the Imperial Russian government. It is unlikely that any
money letters will be found addressed to the centuries-older Panteleimon
Monastery, also Russian Orthodox.
The reason is simple: the first three
institutions closed in the 1960s and 1970s as the last monks died off. The
Panteleimon still exists and in recent years has been restored and expanded
with fairly massive support from the Russian government and Russian oligarchs.
Mont Athos has been part of Greece since 1912-13 but still enjoys considerable
autonomy; for example, it is exempt from EU free movement rules and if you want
to visit you need a visa and to get a visa you need to be, at least, male. Access
is by boat from Thessaloniki; there is no land route and that has always been
the case. There is a small port (Daphne) and landing facilities at the Panteleimon
monastery.
When the three other
monasteries finally closed after decades of decline, monks from the senior
monasteries on which they depended (The Greek Orthodox Vatopedi, the Serbian Hilandar) tried to raise funds by selling off secular archive material. Documents and
objects of religious significance were removed to other monasteries, but secular papers were taken by the sackful or suitcase full to Thessaloniki and Athens.
The task was not easy - there were no roads only paths on Athos, no
electricity, and moving stuff around wasn’t easy. The monks eventually
gave up on the project. Here is a link to photographs of the administrative offices of one
of the three Russian institutions, taken
in the past five years by a visitor to Mont Athos. They show the remains of an
archive in a room which is now open to both winds and rain; just keep scrolling down through the images
The money letters
themselves look like this and I want to propose two theories about them.
Click on Images to Enlarge
First
theory. The letters normally have a despatch cancel and a
transit cancel of Odessa. The long and complicated addresses nearly always
contain a routing “via Odessa”. But only in a very, very small number of cases
is there an arrival mark. There was a Russian ROPIT post office on Athos, mail
arrived in Russian ROPIT boats and given the nature of the letters, one would
expect to see an arrival mark. So why is it normally missing?
My theory is
this. When the very numerous money letters arrived in Odessa, they were sorted
according to their final destinations, of which there were in reality only four
likely ones. So a bag would be created for St Andrew, another for St John, and
so on. Then the bags would be sealed and would arrive sealed in Athos where the
ROPIT post office would simply hand them over to monks from the monasteries
whose job it was to collect their mail. The very small number of letters with
ROPIT AFON arrival marks would have been those put in a late bag, unsorted, or
put into it because they had unclear addresses. In addition, some may have been
later handed back to the ROPIT office on Athos by monastery monks because they
had been mis-sorted in Odessa.
The system of making up
the bags in Odessa may help explain why the routing “via Odessa” appears to be
obligatory. But there may be another reason:
Second
theory: a lot of money got sent to Mont Athos in the sixty
years from the 1840s to 1914. It was always accompanied by some kind of letter
indicating what the money was for: prayers, candles, and so on. But on Athos
itself the money was fairly useless. The monks had to import most of what they
needed for both secular and religious purposes. They grew some food locally and
had pharmacies, printing presses, candle making factories, and even
photographic studios - but all the equipment and raw material had to be
imported: from Odessa, from Taganrog,
from Kerch, from Constantinople. That generated a very large number of bills to
be paid.
In the March 2020
Heinrich Koehler Wiesbaden auction, many hundreds of invoices addressed to Mont
Athos will be included in the sale of a large collection of Athos material. How
were those invoices paid? There are several possibilities: monks went down to
the port of Daphne with a sack of money and paid the captain of the boat which
was making a delivery; monks travelled to Odessa and so on with cash in a bag
and went around paying bills; the monks sent money letters out from Mont Athos
to all the firms to which they owed money. And so on.
There is another
possibility. The money letters were opened in the Odessa post office and the
money removed, under the supervision of local agents of the Athos monasteries.
The money was then banked locally and bills were settled via the banking system
or by monks who came to Odessa and took
money from the bank there and then went around paying bills. The amount of
money removed was carefully noted and the money letter envelopes were sent on
to Athos with the letters inside which indicated the uses for which the money
was intended: the prayers and candles and so on. Other material in the Koehler auction indicates that the
monasteries were involved in major use of the banking system in Odessa and
Constantinople. Someone may be able to test my very speculative theory by
piecing together the history. An obvious alternative theory would say that the money really did go to Athos and that monks there were then tasked with taking it off Athos to Odessa and Constantinople and banking it there for future use in paying bills.
Added 27 December 2019: Howard Weinert provides the following very interesting information:
The following excerpt is from the official government newspaper Pravitelstvenny Vestnik.
Issue of 13 August 1894: According to the old ROPiT treaty of 1872, money and declared value packets addressed to Afon were opened at the Odessa post office, and the enclosed money was handed over to a ROPiT agent for transmission to Afon by ROPiT ship. The addressee had to pay a fee on delivery. According to the new ROPiT treaty effective 1 Sept. 1894, all fees will be collected when the mail is posted and no mail will be opened.