In a medieval monastery on the Mount Athos peninsula in northeastern Greece, researchers are gaining a glimpse of what life was like in the region over six hundred years ago. Records by the Ottoman Empire from that period have sat virtually unknown inside the Pantokrator Monastery’s metal library. But now researchers are looking for the first time into roughly 25,000 documents thought to be the oldest Ottoman records ever discovered. Some of the documents in the collection date back to 1374 or 1371. Before this find, researchers believed the oldest Ottoman documents were stored in Istanbul’s a…