History
The name "Hilandar" is derived from chelandion, a type of Byzantine transport ship, whose skipper was called a "helandaris". The ancient cell of Helandaris was donated by Emperor Alexios III Angelos (1195–1203) "to the Serbs as an eternal gift..." and Stefan Nemanja establishes and endows the monastery in 1198 (before 13 February 1199).
In 1426 Gjon Kastrioti from Albania and his three sons (one of them was Skanderbeg) donated the right to the proceeds from taxes collected from the two villages (Rostuša and Trebište in Macedonia) and from the church of Saint Mary, which was in one of them, to the Hilandar where his son Reposh Kastrioti retired and died in 25 July 1431: in his honor the Saint George tower of Hilandar was known as the Albanian tower (Serbian: Arbanaški pirg).
Two medieval Bulgarian royal charters, the Virgino Charter and the Oryahov Charter, have been found in Hilandar's library. After the fall of Serbia and Bulgaria under Ottoman rule, the influx of Serbian monks decreased at the expense of Bulgarians, particularly from Macedonia. From the 17th to the 19th century, Hilandar was predominantly Bulgarian-populated: in his account of 1745, the Russian pilgrim Vasily Barsky writes that the monks of Hilandar were all Bulgarians. Ilarion Makariopolski, Sophronius of Vratsa and Matey Preobrazhenski have all lived there, and it was in this monastery that Saint Paisius of Hilendar began his revolutionary Slavonic-Bulgarian History. The monastery was dominated by Bulgarians until 1902.
However, in 1913, Serbian presence in the Holy Mountain was quite big and the Protos was the Serbian representative of Hilandar.
In the 1970s, the Greek government offered power grid installation to all of the monasteries on Mount Athos. The Holy Council of Mount Athos refused, and since then every monastery generates its own power, which is gained mostly from renewable energy sources. During the 1980s, electrification of the monastery of Hilandar took place, generating power mostly for lights and heating.
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