- TURY.CLUB
- Tourist Objects
- Armenia
- Yerevan
- Institute of Ancient Manuscripts Matenadaran
Matenadaran, which was opened on March 1, 1959, is a research institute and a unique repository of ancient manuscripts. More than 16 thousand manuscripts about the centuries-old history of the Armenian people, their art, literature and natural sciences are stored and studied in the Matenadaran funds. These are the works of more than 80 Armenian chroniclers of the 10th-18th centuries and their contemporaries, as well as translations of prominent scholars and thinkers of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Here are isolated and oldest copies of manuscripts of world literature, the originals of which are irretrievably lost, and today mankind is acquainted with them only in the Armenian translation. Matenadaran is of particular importance as an art museum, which presents a unique collection of book paintings and those types of arts and crafts that are associated with the art of a manuscript book: fabric samples, embossed on the skin, metal plastics and jewelry. In Matenadaran, at the basement level, there are manuscript repositories, as well as laboratories for working on manuscripts. In the upper floors there are exhibition halls, study rooms, a reading room, catalogs. Reference: Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts "Matenadaran", the world's largest repository of ancient Armenian manuscripts and a research institute in Yerevan. It was created on the basis of the collection of manuscripts of the Echmiadzin Monastery nationalized in 1920. M. building was built in 1959 (architect M. Grigoryan). The Matenadaran funds (as of 1972) contain 12,960 Armenian manuscripts and over 100,000 ancient archival documents, about 2,000 manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and other languages. The manuscripts of Matenadaran are of great scientific and historical value as the most important primary sources for studying the history and spiritual culture of Armenia, as well as the neighboring peoples of the Caucasus, the Near and Middle East. The Matenadaran contains manuscripts of the 5-18 centuries, a unique collection of first-printed and early printed Armenian books of the 16-18 centuries, the writings of ancient and medieval Armenian historians, writers, philosophers, mathematicians, geographers, doctors, translations of the works of ancient Greek, Syrian, Arabic and Latin scholars, in including a number of works not preserved in the original language. The Matenadaran Museum exhibits the best examples of ancient Armenian writing and miniatures. Many manuscripts are of great artistic value (for example, “Lazarevskiy gospel”, 887, “Echmiadzin gospel”, 989, “Gospel of Mugni”, 11th century). In Matenadaran, research work is underway: the study and publication of monuments of Armenian writing, the study of problems of Armenian textology, source studies, paleography, medieval book painting, historiography, scientific translations of monuments into Russian and other languages. Since 1940 the collection "Banber Matenadarani" has been published ("Bulletin of the Matenadaran" in Armenian with a summary in Russian and French).
