Metropolitan Gavriil (Banulesko-Bodoni) and Greek-Russian Conflict over Dedicated Monastic Estates, 1787–1812

One of the more frequently cited but less well understood issues involving Eastern Orthodox interests and modern nationalism in the Balkans has been that of the so-called dedicated monasteries. Dedicated monasteries (prek Ionennye or, in Moldavian, inchinat monasteries) were those landed estates, mainly in the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, which were entrusted to the administration of one or another of the Greek patriarchates, holy places, or monasteries of the Near East so that the profits from the land might be used to sustain Greek Orthodox institutions under Ottoman, Islamic rule. These estates, dating to the first such bequests by Danubian boyars in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, became the loci for monastic institutions which yielded a constant source of revenue to their Orthodox trustees in the Near East up to the middle of the nineteenth century.