Matenadaran

Where the Matenadaran is

The Matenadaran closes off the north end of Mesrop Mashtots Avenue, one of the main streets of central Yerevan. It stands on a terrace where the ground starts to rise towards the hills above the city. The avenue runs straight at it, so the building is visible along the whole street and acts as its full stop.

The building is deliberately unlike the offices around it. It is faced in dark basalt and set behind a flight of steps. Instead of the classicism of the surrounding blocks, its details borrow from medieval Armenian architecture: an arcaded front, carved figures of scholars and writers along the facade, and, at the foot of the steps, a seated statue of Mashtots with a pupil.

Two nearby landmarks are often mixed up with it. The Cascade complex, a few hundred metres to the west, belongs to a different institution entirely. The statue in front of the steps is a monument, not part of the collection. The real Matenadaran lies behind and beneath the facade: the reading rooms, the laboratories and the vaults.

What the institution is

The Matenadaran does three jobs that usually belong to three separate bodies. As a repository, it is the national archive of Armenian manuscripts and keeps them physically intact. As a research institute, it employs scholars to edit, catalogue and study its holdings. And as a museum, it runs an exhibition open to the public.

That mix explains most of what a visitor notices. The exhibition is small compared with the collection, because the collection was never mainly a display. Most of the manuscripts are in storage, in conservation or being studied, and were never meant to be on show all the time. Nothing is being hidden: a page of parchment simply cannot spend decades under light.

The formal name, the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts, refers to the research body. *Matenadaran* is what everyone actually calls it. Both names mean the same organisation, and signs, publications and catalogues use them side by side, which is useful to know before trying to match them up.

The word, and whose name it carries

*Matenadaran* is an ordinary Armenian compound word meaning a depository of books, and it is much older than this institution. Medieval Armenian monasteries had matenadarans of their own, and medieval sources use the word for those collections. The building in Yerevan simply took a common noun as its proper name, as a national library might.

The institute is named after Mesrop Mashtots, who devised the Armenian alphabet early in the fifth century. With Sahak Partev, he set up the schools and translation work that produced the first Armenian books. The name is more than decoration. Most of what the building holds is written in the script he designed, and the institution sees itself as heir to the copying tradition he began.

The name is also younger than the institution, a detail that is easy to get wrong. The collection was already in Yerevan, and already a research institute, when it was given Mashtots's name in 1962. That was a naming decision of the Soviet period, not a founding date, though the two are often reported as one.

How manuscripts were kept before there was an institute

For more than a thousand years, Armenian manuscripts were kept by the monasteries that produced them. Monastic scriptoria copied, bound and stored books, and monasteries across the Armenian lands held their own collections. Whether a manuscript survived depended on the roof over it, and on someone thinking it worth copying again when the parchment wore out.

The system worked, but it was extremely fragile. Manuscripts were burned, looted and scattered in every period of upheaval. Those that reached modern times did so through repeated rescue: carried from one monastery to another, buried, ransomed, and in several famous cases split between two carriers so that at least half would survive.

Over time the Mother See at Etchmiadzin built up the largest single collection. Its library grew from the fifteenth century onwards, after the Catholicosate was restored there in 1441, and it was catalogued several times in the modern period. An inventory in 1828 recorded about eighteen hundred manuscripts; by 1913 the count had passed four thousand. That library is the direct ancestor of the collection in Yerevan today.

How the collection came to Yerevan

The move happened in stages over about twenty years, and each stage has its own date. During the First World War the manuscript library of Etchmiadzin was evacuated to Moscow for safety and kept there from 1915 until 1922. In the same years, just before and during the Armenian Genocide, the Catholicos organised the rescue of manuscripts from Vaspurakan, Mush and Erzurum. Those that were saved joined the collection. Much of what was not saved is simply gone.

In December 1920 the new Soviet Armenian government nationalised the Matenadaran of Etchmiadzin by decree. The owner changed; the location did not. For most of the next two decades the books stayed at Etchmiadzin, now as state property instead of church property.

The physical transfer to Yerevan came in 1939, when just under ten thousand Armenian manuscripts and several hundred in other languages were moved to the state library in the capital. These three events (evacuation, nationalisation and transfer) are often squeezed into one sentence about the collection being "moved to Yerevan". Keeping them apart is what turns a slogan into a history.

The building, and the institute inside it

The building most people mean by "the Matenadaran" dates from the mid-twentieth century. It was designed by the architect Mark Grigoryan. Work began in 1945, stopped for years after the war, and was finished in the second half of the 1950s. Sources disagree on the exact completion year, as often happens when a project stops and restarts.

Its architecture quotes the Middle Ages without pretending to be medieval. The dark basalt, the arcades and the carved figures deliberately echo Armenian church building, but behind them is a modern museum and archive with vaults, reading rooms and laboratories. A visitor who takes the facade for an old building has read it just as the architect intended, and got it exactly wrong.

In 1959 the collection moved into the building and the organisation was reorganised as a scientific research institute. In institutional terms, that is when the modern Matenadaran begins. Three years later it was named after Mesrop Mashtots. Neither date is when the collection was formed, and neither is when the building was designed.

In 2011 a second, much larger research building opened behind the original, and most of the storage, conservation and research now happens there. The 1950s building remains the public face and the museum, while the working institute has largely moved behind it.

What it holds, and why the numbers differ

The collection is overwhelmingly Armenian, but not only Armenian. Alongside the Armenian manuscripts are books in Arabic, Persian, Greek, Syriac, Latin, Ethiopic and other languages, some of them acquired through the same monastic networks that produced the Armenian ones. The subjects go far beyond scripture, into history, law, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, grammar and music.

Published totals do not agree, and it helps to know why. UNESCO's Memory of the World register entry, made in 1997, describes a collection of about seventeen thousand manuscripts. The institution's own figure is roughly twenty thousand. Counts that list fragments and scrolls separately run higher still. Archival documents, such as decrees, deeds and letters, are counted in a separate series altogether, running into the hundreds of thousands.

None of these figures is wrong; they count different things at different dates. So this article describes the collection instead of pinning it to one number, which is also the fairest answer to the question visitors usually ask first. What is certain is that it is one of the largest collections of Armenian manuscripts anywhere, and that no single visit shows more than a fraction of it.

Inside the manuscripts

An Armenian manuscript is a crafted object before it is a text, and the exhibition is laid out to show this. Most of the earlier manuscripts are written on parchment and the later ones on paper. The scripts changed enough over time that a specialist can date a hand to within a century. Bindings are usually wooden boards covered in leather, often blind-stamped, sometimes with metal fittings, and occasionally in silver.

The illuminated manuscripts are what most visitors come for. Armenian illumination has its own repertoire: canon tables framed as architecture, portraits of the evangelists, and margins decorated with birds and plant forms. It also had its own workshops, some tied to particular monasteries and recognisable by style. The pigments are mineral and organic, and the deep blues and reds are still remarkably strong on the page. The catalogue literature on the Morgan Library's 1994 exhibition, *Treasures in Heaven*, is a good introduction to what you are looking at.

The makers are usually named. A scribe wrote the manuscript and, if it was illustrated, an illuminator painted it, and these were often two different people. The colophon at the end, in Armenian a *hishatakaran* or memorial record, usually names them, along with the patron, the place and the date.

These colophons are why Armenian manuscripts matter even to historians who cannot read Armenian. Scribes wrote down what was happening around them: invasions, taxes, famines, prices, the death of a bishop. Avedis Sanjian's edition of the colophons of 1301 to 1480 gathered them as a historical source in their own right. Thanks to this habit, a collection of religious books doubles as a running record of everyday life across four centuries.

The work behind the exhibition

Most of the Matenadaran's work goes on out of sight. Staff catalogue and describe manuscripts, edit and publish texts, and produce scholarly editions, facsimiles and a journal. Cataloguing the collection is itself a project lasting decades, because describing a manuscript properly means recording its contents, handwriting, illumination, binding and colophons.

Conservation is the other half of the job. Parchment, paper, pigment and leather each decay in their own way, so the institute runs laboratories to stabilise and repair them, along with controlled storage. This is why the collection is not simply put on display. Digitisation is now part of the work too, so scholars anywhere can read a manuscript while the object itself stays in a vault.

Preservation is also the reason the institution exists at all. A collection scattered across a hundred monasteries survived by luck. A single repository, funded and professionally staffed, is an attempt to stop depending on luck. That is a modern idea, and the Matenadaran is one of the clearest examples of it applied to a medieval inheritance.

What to understand before seeing it

First, expect a gap between the collection and the display. The exhibition shows a curated selection, rotated for conservation reasons. A visitor who expects thousands of manuscripts will see dozens, and that is how it should be.

Second, keep the dates in their layers. The manuscripts are medieval; the collection was assembled over centuries at Etchmiadzin; the institution was created in the twentieth century; the building dates from the 1950s; the name from 1962. Each of these is sometimes given as "the Matenadaran was founded in…", and this article separates them because the squeezed version is so common.

Third, this is a working institute and not only a museum, and that shapes what you see. Behind the display cases, readers, conservators and cataloguers do the work that keeps the manuscripts legible. The manuscripts themselves are the survivors of a very long process of copying, hiding and rescue.