From an old collection to a research institution
The Matenadaran is in Yerevan, Armenia's capital, with a core collection originating in the manuscripts of the Catholicosate at Etchmiadzin. The collection moved to Yerevan in 1939. On 3 March 1959, the Council of Ministers of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic reorganized the Matenadaran as a scientific research institution, bringing custody of old books and systematic research together.
The building designed by Mark Grigoryan was constructed in 1945–1957; establishment of the research institution was a separate phase. In 1962, it was named for Mesrop Mashtots, creator of the Armenian alphabet. Its research subjects include historical, medical, philosophical and literary manuscripts, as well as documents in languages such as Persian and Arabic.
The development of personnel and departments
Historian Levon Khachikian was central to the research organization. He joined the Matenadaran after graduating from Yerevan State University's history department in 1940, spent a short period at the Academy of Sciences' Institute of History, and returned to lead the institution in 1954, remaining until his death in 1982.
In a commemorative volume, Vahan Ter-Ghevondyan recalls that Khachikian not only participated in construction of the building but designed departments, set research directions, and selected and trained specialists. Buildings give a manuscript institution storage space; researchers need ancient languages, skills in reading scripts and documentary scholarship to turn collections into materials that can be studied.
References: [3]
Preservation, cataloguing and publication
The research institution had departments for preservation, cataloguing, research, publication and translation, together with restoration and binding workshops. Restoration addressed paper and binding problems, cataloguing identified texts, and critical editing and translation brought individual works into scholarship. These interconnected tasks expressed its early objectives.
Two volumes of a concise catalogue of Armenian manuscripts, published in 1965 and 1970, were compiled by Onik Yeganyan, Andranik Zeytunian and Paylak Antabyan. Indexes of contents, colophons, fragments, personal names and place names enabled researchers to find documents for specific questions. The Bulletin of Matenadaran provided a continuing venue for publishing results.
Public funding and project support
Long-term operation relied on support from public institutions and specialized research projects. A 2004 report by the US National Research Council lists 39.9 million drams for the Matenadaran in Armenia's 2003 science budget, representing 1.3 percent of that year's science budget. This is a record of institutional funding for a specified year.
Individual outputs could also require separate funding. The research project for the Persian manuscript catalogue published in 2017 was sponsored by the Iran Heritage Foundation. Printing was funded through a company's donation to the Friends of Matenadaran charitable foundation. Research and publication thus had distinct funding stages.
How a Persian manuscript catalogue was completed
Between 2005 and 2017, Kristine Kostikyan compiled a catalogue of Persian manuscripts, rechecking earlier handwritten records that were brief and contained misidentifications. She distinguished information about composition of a work from production of its surviving copy, recorded scribes, binders, materials, missing leaves and damage, and compared versions in other collections.
This required collaboration across languages. Colleagues supplied Arabic and Turkish portions, another person edited the English, and the author also worked at Iran's Parliamentary Library. A single catalogue entry could therefore present textual identity, physical condition and evidence about versions, rather than merely a title.
References: [5]
Bringing images and texts together
From May 2021 to May 2022, the Matenadaran ran the Armenian Manuscript Illumination (AMI) project, funded by the New York-based Yervant Terzian Armenian National Science and Education Fund. A three-person team divided the work: Ani Shahnazaryan entered codicological information, colophons and Gospel text; Lusine Sargsyan handled history, explanations of illuminations and bibliography; and Levon Sargsyan developed the website.
The project placed illuminations corresponding to Gospel passages in different manuscripts into searchable comparison tables, cooperating with collections in Venice, Vienna and Jerusalem. Researchers could compare how different artists treated the same passage. Catalogue descriptions thereby became an entry point for comparing text and image.
References: [6]