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John the Apostle and the Evangelist stayed on Patmos, the island in the Dodecanese Archipelago, in the Aegean Sea, at the end of the 1st century AD, where he wrote the Apocalypse, the last canonic book of the New Testament. A millennium later, in 1088, the cleric Christodoulos established a monastery on Patmos dedicated to this great personality in Christian history. In the Monastery of St. John the Apostle, which had a rather tumultuous history during the next nine centuries, there is one of the largest and richest libraries of the type, which represents a particular treasure not only for the Monastery or the Orthodox Christianity in general, but for science and researchers of the past from various scientific fields who come to the Monastery from all parts of the world. The library collections in Patmos Monastery can be grouped into three categories: codices, documents and printed books. Speaking of codices, it is a well-known fact that the initial Christodoulos collection, which, as it turned out, had been the nucleus from which the voluminous treasury of many different manuscripts evolved, consisted of 330 manuscript codices. Thanks to the constant inflow, the number of manuscripts kept growing in later periods, so that by 1890 the collection consisted of an impressive 855 manuscripts. The library also contains around 150 documents dating from the Byzantine period, and this number excludes many official and unofficial documents. On the other hand, the number of documents dating from the post-Byzantine period is considerably larger - over 13,000. The post-Byzantine collection of documents includes many of those written in foreign languages, such as Latin (68), Romanian (36), and Turkish (1,300). The library collection of the Monastery of St. John the Apostle also contains around three thousand printed books. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byzantine civilization did not know the printed book: it was a civilization of manuscripts and manuscript books (codices) made of papyrus, parchment, and paper. The ancient Greeks bequeathed to the Byzantines the word Logos (in multiple meanings – word, speech, mind, reason, supreme principle, the divine creative power, the word of God, the word as the bearer of life and light), as the greatest treasure. The Rhomaioi (Byzantines) polished the skill of use of words and the ability to persuade with words to their full glory. However, the use of words within Byzantine civilization flourished completely and reached its apogee in literature. An important feature of the Greek language in Byzantine times (the period from the fourth to the fifteenth century) is diglossia, i.e. the existence of two different varieties of a language used under different conditions within a community – a high, socially prestigious form, used for writing, and a low, simpler, everyday spoken form. For Christians, a sensitive issue was the attitude towards the ancient pagan heritage: they accepted what did not conflict with their dogmas, and rejected the rest. Today, there are about 55,000 Greek manuscripts in the world, of which about 40,000 are Byzantine. In order to be distributed to readers and preserved from decay, manuscript books were being transcribed in scriptoriums, in which not only monks but also secular people of various professions were working. Books were very expensive. There were public, imperial, patriarchal, monastic, and private libraries, with not large collections of manuscripts. As Byzantine civilization was approaching its decline, the migration of Greek manuscripts from Byzantium to the Latin world of Western Europe began. In that way, the great heritage of ancient civilization was preserved and transferred to European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]