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| ©S. Mashtotz Institute of Ancient Manuscripts, Matenadaran |
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
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| ©S. Mashtotz Institute of Ancient Manuscripts, Matenadaran |
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.
Copier, numériser : la logique est la même
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| ©S. Mashtotz Institute of Ancient Manuscripts, Matenadaran |
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
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