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YEREVAN, (AFP) - Over a meter (yard) wide when
opened and weighing 32 kilograms (15 pounds), the
Homilies of Mush is the largest ancient Armenian
book to be rescued from eastern Anatolia during
anti-Armenian massacres in Ottoman Turkey almost a
century ago.
Archivists say the story of how the manuscript and
many others like it were saved could be more telling
of the plight of the Armenian people then what the
intricate Armenian lettering describes within the
pages.
Armenia marks the 90th anniversary Sunday of mass
killings by the Ottoman Turks, a slaughter that is
among the most painful episodes of Armenia's
history, the costs of which Armenians measure not
only in lost lives but also a destroyed cultural
heritage.
Some 9,000 rare manuscripts are estimated to have
been destroyed as Armenians were driven from their
homeland in World War I, but about 30 books
currently on display in Armenia's Archive of Ancient
Manuscripts are believed to have been rescued by
fleeing peasants.
One of these texts are the Mush Homilies. In 1915
when Ottoman forces attacked Mush, an illiterate
peasant woman is said to have found the massive book
in the courtyard of a church.
Too heavy to carry whole, she cut the 800-year-old
book in half and took one half, according to the
director of the Archive, Sem Arevshatyan.
The unnamed woman initially brought the text to the
seat of Armenia's Gregorian Apostolic church in
Echmitzin where it was later to be joined by the
other half, discovered by a retreating Russian
colonel named Nikolai de Roberti.
"Many of these books were brought by illiterate,
unread people, who nevertheless understood that
these texts were immensely important," Areshatyan
said.
"Instead of taking their personal belongings they
carried these books."
Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kinsmen
perished in orchestrated killings between 1915 and
1917 as the Ottoman Empire executed a genocidal plan
to wipe Armenians and their culture off of the map.
Ankara counters that 300,000 Armenians and thousands
of Turks were killed in "civil strife" during World
War I when the Armenians rose against their Ottoman
rulers and sided with invading Russian troops.
Either way, little today is left of the numerous
Armenian settlements that once characterized Eastern
Anatolia, known as Western Armenia to Armenians.
Many churches have since been converted to mosques
or taken apart so their stones could be used to
build homes, and the some 40,000 Armenians that
remain in Turkey rarely speak the language outdoors.
According to Arevshatyan not all of the attacking
Turks were willing to follow through completely on
the alleged plan.
"Many books were destroyed but some were sold to
collectors in Europe by Turkish officers who
understood that they had value," Arevshatyan said.
A slow trickle of antique texts continues to fill
the archive's shelves to this day as more Armenian
works pillaged in Anatolia are discovered by
collectors around the world and donated to the
repository.
Earlier this week a Diaspora Armenian from Paris was
able to convince the sister of a collector who
recently passed away to donate a page from a lost
tenth century bible to the archive.
"Hopefully when she sees that it is good hands she
will be willing to donate more works from the
collection," said Claude Mutafrian, a 62-year-old
historian on medieval Armenia who carried the
sheepskin sheet to Yerevan from Paris.
AFP
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