Nikopoulos Anastasios, The special status of the Holy Mountain through decisions of the ottoman sacral Court of Thessloniki in 1832
Some sentences of the ottoman sacral Court of Thessaloniki, issued on 4 & 8 June 1832, provide information on juridical cases of tax disputes, while at the same time confirming the ancient privileged status of Mount Athos and its dependencies, just ten years after the outbreak of the Greek Revolution. At the same time, in addition to the special fiscal status of the Mount Athos dependencies, the Ottoman court also confirms the established legal property status of the dependencies, both on the basis of the titles of property (mulknames) and on the basis of the special hereditary status of the dependencies as Christian waqf, according to Ottoman and Islamic law as well. The specific protection of the Athonite status was based on a dialectical dynamic between, on the one hand, the Ottoman elite of local officials, who at every opportunity oppressed the monks and tried to benefit from the surplus value of the dependencies, and on the other hand, the central Sultan's authority, which, as another heir to the Byzantine institutional tradition, provided the monastic regime and its components with the same protection as the Byzantine emperors had once provided, both at the level of legal institutions, by issuing normative firmans confirming and supporting the Athonite regime, and at the level of judicial authority, by mobilizing the local judge (cadis), who, under the high sultanic supervision, applied the special Athonite law and even harmonized it with the law of the şarīˁa.
