Founded by St Philotheos in the last quarter of the tenth century, it was obscure until Serbian and Bulgarian monks settled there between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. As the Slav monks left, the monastery again became obscure; until the eighteenth century, when the Greek princes of Moldavia and Wallachia made grants to the monastery, with which the brotherhood had guest quarters, cells and chapels built. At 1990, there were seventy-nine monks.