In the early 1870s, a turmoil at the Monastery of Saint Paul shook the monastic community of Mount Athos. The incidents of the case have been documented in the press of the time, mainly in the newspapers of the Romans of Constantinople.

How did an issue from the microcosm of Athos, which according to the Archives of the Archbishop of Syros, Tinos, and Milos, Alexandros Lycurgus (1827-1875), arose due to financial issues, take on the dimensions of a national problem? And how was the excommunication of the monastery’s abbot by the Saint Paul Brotherhood linked to the developments that the severance of the Bulgarian Exarchate from the flock of the Great Church in September 1872 brought to the populations of Macedonia and Thrace?