Unesco finds fake documents Of Ottoman Empire

[Gavur]

UNESCO CENSORS ARCHIVE DOCUMENTS OF OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Yerevan, JUne 12. ArmInfo. The exhibition of archive documents of
Ottoman Turkey to be held last week in Paris has been put off because
UNESCO has censored some of the documents.

Zaman reports UNESCO to ask Turkey to remove 5 and to replace 2 of 50
documents. The source says that the documents are "friendly letters"
sent by representatives of the Armenian community of Turkey to the
Turkish Sultan in 1889 and 1895. UNESCO says that these documents may
"cause the anger" of the Armenian community of France.

Other sources say that UNESCO demanded this because the documents
were obviously faked.

[Gavur]

Not always money talks sometimes idiots walk

UNESCO Censorship on Ottoman Archive Criticized
By Mukremin Albayrak, Serbest Ozden, Istanbul
Published:
zaman.com


Historians showed harsh reaction to United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Education, UNESCO, for censoring documents in the exhibition of Ottoman Archives scheduled to be held in France’s capital Paris.

Emphasizing that the attitude of UNESCO does not agree with its real mission or historical realities, the historians supported the ministry’s cancellation of the exhibition.

Terming the events as “a shame”, Turkish Institute of History (TTK) President Professor Yusuf Halacoglu said, “It is nonsense for an organization required to be effective on cultural dialogue and union to strive to ban some documents.”

Reporting that the ones intervening with the exhibition continuously called for freedom of expression and limitation of information, Halacoglu continued: “Turkey acted in good faith to solve the Armenian genocide. The cases never refer to science or honesty anymore. There are some letters, which Armenians forwarded to the Ottoman Empire from America and Canada to ask for help. We are face to face with such a big shame.”

Said Ozturk from the Foundation of Ottoman Researches designated the UNESCO’s request for a change on the historical documents as sorrowful. It is of concern to sovereignty, Ozturk warned, “You will accept the exhibition or refuse it.”

[Gavur]

“Ottoman Empire: The War Machine” Documentary Cancelled in U.S.

28.06.2006 17:41 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ History Channel, which broadcasts in a number of countries worldwide abruptly cancelled the scheduled showing of a documentary on the Ottoman State. The documentary titled “Ottoman Empire: The War Machine” scheduled to be shown on June 22-23-24 was cancelled without a prior notice or explanation. Turkish viewers, who tuned in the program’s scheduled hour were astonished. Those who complained to the network about the sudden cancellation were told: “The montage wasn’t ready yet.” Immediately following this statement, it was announced the documentary would be shown on July 24. The DVD of the documentary was on sale on the channel’s web site when the statement was made. Internet sales of the DVD were later discontinued. After the scheduled broadcast date of July 24 was announced online, it was replaced by the notice: “We apologize, but the program scheduled for this hour will not be shown” The film documents the stages of the Ottoman State from its rise to decline, reported Zaman.

[Gavur]

Memory of the World

In the heart of Erevan, capital of Armenia, the Matenadaran houses seventeen thousand manuscripts and 30,000 documents, some dating back to antiquity. Texts on very varied subjects, written in Arabic, Persian, Syriac, Greek, Latin, Amharic, Japanese and certain Indian languages, are stored together in this museum-library, created at the same time as the Armenian alphabet in 405. Today the Matenadaran is entering the digital age thanks to UNESCO.


A Library’s Digital Revival
After five centuries, most of the surviving works of the Bibliotheca Corviniana will be under the same roof again, reunited in digital form. More

At Gayane Eliazarian’s fingertips, fine scissors or a brush remove time’s wrinkles from a page, bring out the carmine red of an illumination, or save a thousand-year-old text from obliteration. The workshop she runs restores an average of 20 to 30 manuscripts a year. The task is both titanic and painstaking, in certain cases requiring several years. Ms Eliazarian is proud to show off a 19th century Russian book on her desk, sent to Erevan from St Petersburg for restoration. Proof of the Matenadaran’s expertise in this domain…And work on this kind of “recent” document is nothing compared to what will be needed for this 11th century Armenian book of the gospels that Ms Eliazarian pulls out of the safe, where the manuscripts soon to be “resuscitated” are kept.

When such efforts are deployed to preserve ancient texts, it’s best to go digital. “Whatever precautions are taken in terms of preserving manuscripts, you can never completely rule out the possibility that some will be physically destroyed by the passage of time. Digitizing is the surest means to safeguard these unique documents,” asserts Chouchanik Khatchadrian, a researcher at the Matenadaran.




Virtual Matenadaran: free admission



As part of the UNESCO program “Memory of the World”, a team led by Archak Banutchyan developed in 2000 and 2001 the Virtual Matenadaran on the museum’s website. The result: the creation of a virtual gallery, containing more than 1000 illuminations that can be contemplated at leisure on the site; more than 5000 pages of manuscripts posted on line, with descriptions and translations from Armenian into French; a data base, to consult these pages or to search the Matenadaran collection. “Our choice of documents to be digitized and put on line was guided by three criteria,” explains Mr Banutchyan. “First, we chose the pages we’d already published. Then our researchers identified excerpts that were the most representative of the manuscripts’ content in terms of the subjects concerned, from the religious to the profane, from history to medicine. Finally we took into account the artistic qualities of the works – the esthetic aspect of the manuscripts, the kind of illuminations, and so on.”

This project is innovative because, as Mr Banutchayan points out, “in the late 1990s, we were only beginning to be aware of the importance of internet resources and digitization in general.” Now we see that the project has made it possible not only for the Matenadaran scholars to make contact with their foreign counterparts, but also to open the museum’s doors to amateurs from all over the world. A large number of the Matanadaran’s visitors these days first visited its website.




Digitizing represents also a significant advance compared to microfilm techniques. “Putting manuscripts such as these on microfilm takes much longer than digital copying, which requires only one photo per page,” says Gevork Ter Vartanian, the Matenadaran’s chief curator. It reduces the risk of damaging the manuscripts when they are handled – and these are unique documents, many of them Armenian translations of originals that have disappeared for ever.

The same reasoning lies behind copying these manuscripts by hand, as people did 12 centuries ago, and digitizing them, Mr Banuchayan further underlines. The idea is to preserve a unique fragment of the world’s memory. Like the priest from the Lori region who saw how the Communist regime was starting to persecute religion and buried a splendid 15th century New Testament, rescuing it from the threat of destruction. Removed from its underground hiding place only in the 1960s, it was brought in pitiful state to the Matedanaran, where it was restored.


By Laurence Ritter, Armenian journalist and sociologist



© S. Mashtotz Institute of Ancient Manuscripts, Matenadaran
© S. Mashtotz Institute of Ancient Manuscripts, Matenadaran



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