Historic value of the inscriptions in the Monastery of the Holy Trinity near Pljevlja

In the rich treasury of the Monastery of the Holy Trinity near Pljevlja their books and manuscripts, there was preserved a large number of inscriptions which talk about the Monastery itself and its activities since the second quarter of the 16 century through the second half of the 19 century. Naturally, this period of over three centuries was not evenly covered in the before-mentioned notes, but rather, they were grouped around some particular events and certain periods important for the Monastery's history. In any case, a large number of inscriptions were preserved on the books now kept in the Monastery, but also scattered across various libraries and other places. If the formatted patterns and the common monastic phraseology, characteristic to this literary form, are set aside, there remains an abundance of valuable historical data which place the inscriptions in the group of very significant sources for the period of Turkish rule. The historic contents and thus the historic value of the inscriptions preserved at the Monastery of the Holy Trinity could be divided in at least three basic groups. The first consists of the news relating to the living of the monastic brotherhood; the second, more general, consists of the data which provides the circumstantial and mostly basic information about certain significant historic events - whether they were the events that had impact on the world history or the ones relating more to the Monastery's wider community-in this case viewed by the eyes of the contemporary monks the authors of the inscriptions; and finally, the third group consists of not so many news which spoke about the privacy of the authors, about some details from their personal lives. The inscriptions created in the Monastery of the Holy Trinity could serve as some sort of 'tapping into the public opinion pulse' in one part of the Christian Orthodox community fitted into the gigantic mechanism of the Ottoman Empire, since the authors of the inscriptions often gave vent to their feelings and wrote about what was on their minds, which in most cases were the complaints and animosity towards the Turks who had conquered them