A Monastery in the Mountains

At the center of my paper is a monastery, known formally as the Monastery of the Mother of God (Θεοτοκου) but informally as Tatarna (Ταταρνα). Tatarna was founded in the 1556 high up in the Pindus mountains, in a spot where, as the monastic charter declares, no monastery had ever existed before. The Pindus mountains are the rugged mountain chain that runs down the western Greek mainland, beginning in southern Albania and ending close to the Gulf of Corinth. The paper pursues three lines of argument. First, the history of the monastery provides a way in to the history of the Pindus, which are effectively absent from accounts of the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. Above and beyond the Pindus in particular, while the mountain village has been a favorite site of anthropological research, the history of the Balkan mountain chains is almost entirely unwritten. Second, the paper considers the founding of the monastery within the context of the “mass founding or refounding”(in the words of one scholar) of monasteries in the sixteenth century. This phenomenon, while well-known to a select group of scholars, is not something that has been recognized or understood in general narratives of the Ottoman sixteenth century. Finally, this paper tries to understand the “why” of Tatarna’s founding by paying close attention to the “where” of its establishment. I argue that the monastery’s location must be understood at (at least) two levels. The first is environmental and the second is historical, namely the extension of infrastructure across the Ottoman Balkans as the sultans solidified their rule over the course of the relatively peaceful sixteenth century. Thus the paper connects monasteries to empire building, a connection that is not usually made.