The Loss of Armenian Manuscripts During the Genocide

[Reincarnated Am]

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[Joseph]

The Loss of Armenian Manuscripts During the Genocide

http://www.hetq.am/eng/culture/0504-gen.html

[April 24, 2005]

During World War I, no nation lost as great a percentage of its population as the Armenians. In 1915 the Armenian people were the victims of the first systematic genocide, the greatest crime against humanity. At least 1.5 million Armenians were deported from their homeland and brutally murdered.

In addition to human losses, there was immense material damage. More than 66 towns and cities, 25,000 villages, 2,350 churches and 1,500 schools were destroyed. There were irreplaceable cultural losses as well; experts often use the expression "cultural genocide". Once they had wiped out the Armenians, the Turks began to systematically erase every trace of Armenian civilization in Western Armenia, destroying architectural and other cultural treasures.

Among the treasures lost to the Genocide were thousands of Armenian manuscripts.

At the beginning of World War I, the largest collection of Armenian manuscripts was kept in the cathedral of Holy Echmiadzin. In February 1915, to protect them from the perils of war, 4,660 manuscripts and other valuable items were packed into boxes and sent to Moscow, where they were kept in the Holy Cross Armenian church. The same year, Western Armenia became a war zone, and the Turkish government used the opportunity to carry out the deportation and genocide of the Armenian population.

Catholicos of All Armenians Gevorg V instructed Reverend Hovhaness Hyusian, the father superior of the monastery on the Island of Lim in Lake Van, to gather all the manuscripts from the churches on the Islands of Lim, Ktuts, and Akhtamar in Lake Van, and from the city of Van and the surrounding area, and to send them to Echmiazdin. Hyusian succeeded, but only in part.

Through the superhuman efforts of the father superior and others, more than 1,450 manuscripts were transferred to Echmiadzin in 1915 and16. But many times more than that were lost. The churches of Lim and Akhtamar alone, for example, had housed more than 1000 manuscripts. In the region of Vaspurakan, which is close to Eastern Armenia, some of the manuscripts were saved as the war front moved forward. But deeper within Western Armenia, in the Armenian-populated areas of Lesser Armenia and Anatolia, manuscripts and other cultural objects were in most cases completely lost. In Kesaria, for instance, more than 700 manuscripts were destroyed.

The tremendous loss of manuscripts before and during World War I has been detailed by Professor Kolanjian's in a series of articles for Echmiadzin Magazine. Among the treasures he describes that were lost or destroyed are such unique items as, for instance, the 10th century manuscript believed to be the biography of Grigor Nar e katsi, which had been kept in the church in Alyur.

Some manuscripts, it should be noted, were rescued by those Armenians who escaped the Genocide and immigrated to various countries, and later appeared in different museums or were returned to Armenia.

In 1922, after the end of war and a period of instability, the 4,660 manuscripts that had been sent to Moscow were returned to Echmiadzin, where they were added to the 1,730 manuscripts already there. In 1939, the Soviet government nationalized the collection, known as the Matenadaran, and moved it to Yerevan. Today, the Mesrop Mashtots Matenadaran Scientific and Research Institute contains approximately 11,000 Armenian manuscripts. There would be twice as many, if not for the Armenian Genocide of 1915.

Karen Matevosyan

[Gavur]

Thank you for the missing article about the (heh heh!) missing article Joseph.