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Petros is the Greek name for Peter, and there are several early Christian texts and hagiographies that don't get much attention in mainstream churches. The phrase "forgotten sanct" likely refers to Saint Petros of Anatolia or a similar regional martyr whose written record survived only in fragmentary manuscripts kept in monastery archives. People looking this up are usually either scholars hunting primary source material or people who stumbled on a reference in a book and want to follow the trail. The process of accessing these texts isn't complicated, but it requires patience and knowing where to look. Most digital reproductions exist through either the Vatican Apostolic Library's online catalog, the online Patrologia Graeca databases, or regional university special collections. I spent about three weeks tracking down a usable manuscript reference last year when a colleague asked me to verify a citation about Petros's fasting practices in the 9th century. The text I needed wasn't in the standard indices because it was catalogued under a different transliteration variant. That's the first thing to understand before you start: spellings shift constantly between Latin, Greek, and modern European languages. If you're only searching "Petros," you'll miss entries filed under "Petrus," "Petras," or "Pietro." Start with the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca database from the Bollandists. It's the standard reference work for Greek saints' lives. The online version at the Belgische Koninklijke Bibliotheek requires a free registration, but once you have that, you can search the full 12-volume index by name. I found the core Petros manuscript references within about forty minutes after I figured out to include the BHL numbers rather than relying on keyword matching alone. The BHL system assigns each hagiographical text a unique number regardless of which library holds it. That was the workaround that saved me from going down a rabbit hole of dead catalog links for another two days.
From there, you need to determine which specific Petros you're dealing with. There are at least four distinct saints commonly grouped under that name in the eastern tradition, and mixing them up leads to some genuinely confusing citations. The one most people find themselves researching is Petros of Atroa or Petros the Younger, both of whom have substantial but scattered manuscript traditions. Check the date ranges in the BHL entry. Petros of Atroa died around 885 AD. Petros the Younger lived much later, around the 10th century. The texts you'll be reading are completely different in style and theological emphasis depending on which one you've got. For the actual unlocking of the texts, most users will end up accessing scans through the Online Medieval and Classical Library or through JSTOR's special collections access if their institution has a subscription. Some manuscripts are available directly from the Vatopedi Monastery on Mount Athos, but their digitization project is incomplete and the interface is not user-friendly. I found that ordering a few key pages through interlibrary loan from the University of Virginia's special collections actually ended up being faster than navigating the Athos site, even factoring in shipping time. The UVa copies were clear photographs of the relevant folios with minimal glare. One thing nobody warns you about is the translation gap. Most of these texts exist only in Greek manuscript form without a complete modern translation. The Bollandist editions sometimes have Latin translations alongside the Greek, but those are often from the 17th century and contain editorial decisions that don't reflect the original. I ran into this when trying to verify a specific passage about Petros's interaction with a local magistrate. The Latin edition I was using rendered a term as "repented" when the Greek manuscript actually used a word closer to "hesitated." That one word changed the entire interpretation of whether Petros was being portrayed as penitent or strategically cautious. If you can't read Greek yourself, your best bet is to compare at least two different printed editions before relying on any single translation. The editio critica from the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy series is usually more reliable than older patristic compilations, but even those have known errors in the Petros corpus that haven't been fully corrected.
The legacy angle is where this gets interesting. Petros's surviving texts show a fairly consistent pattern of ascetic practice combined with administrative involvement, which was unusual for hermits of that period. Most eremitical figures of the 9th century stayed away from institutional roles. Petros apparently served as an advisor to a regional bishop while maintaining his monastic vows, which created some tension in the source material. Later hagiographers sometimes softened this tension or omitted the disputed passages entirely. If you're reading a version that makes Petros look like a perfectly orthodox hermit with no institutional entanglements, you're probably reading a later redaction rather than the earliest available text. Cross-reference with what the BHL entry says about the manuscript witnesses for that particular vita. There are also apocryphal texts attached to the Petros name that shouldn't be treated as historical. The 12th-century miracle collection attributed to him has some overlap with narratives from other saints and appears to be largely compiled from existing tropes rather than independent tradition. I'd recommend treating the miracle accounts as evidence of later devotional practice rather than biographical fact. The core biographical details in the earlier manuscripts are generally more reliable, though even those contain hagiographical conventions that need to be read carefully. The detail about Petros feeding a thousand people from a small amount of bread isn't meant to be taken as a literal historical claim the way a modern historian might treat a census record. If you hit a wall trying to access these materials, the Institute for Byzantine Studies in Vienna has a reference service that can help locate specific manuscript sigla. Their response time is slow, usually a couple of weeks, but they tend to know exactly which catalog volume contains a given reference. For most casual researchers, that level of specificity isn't necessary. The basic path is register for the BHL database, identify the correct Petros by date and BHL number, locate the manuscript witnesses through the catalog entries, and then track down scanned pages or interlibrary loan copies of the critical editions. Takes about an afternoon if you already know what you're doing and a few weeks if you're figuring it out as you go.
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