Athens: 24th December 2018:      Orthodox Church sues Princeton over rare sacred texts:

Ecumenical Patriarch Vartholomaios Bartholomew I of Constantinople has filed a lawsuit against Princeton University, New Jersey, demanding the return of four Byzantine-era manuscripts, allegedly stolen from a monastery in Kormista, a village in northern Greece.

The lawsuit, filed December 13, alleges that Bulgarian guerrilla forces stormed the Theotokos Eikosiphoinissa Monastery in 1917, assaulted the monks who lived there and made off with a trove of ancient texts. The looted treasures were subsequently disseminated to dealers and auction houses across Central Europe.

The monastery which was founded in the fifth century is one of the oldest in the Greek region of Macedonia. Before the raid, it had become the home of what the lawsuit described as “a remarkable collection of books, relics and valuable Byzantine manuscripts.”

In 1921, four years after the raid, Princeton bought one of the manuscripts from the Frankfurt-based auction house Joseph Baer & Co. Three years later, a trustee and alumnus of the university purchased the three remaining manuscripts before donating them to the college in 1942.

A university spokesman said that based in the evidence available to them, and the provenance research done by them, there was no reason to conclude that the manuscripts in their possession were looted during the World War I or that they had been improperly removed from the possession of the Patriarchate.