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Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019, x-402 pages, 20 plates, $30
Jesse Siragan Arlen
p. 200-204
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Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019, x-402 pages, 20 plates, $30

Texte intégral

1The Missing Pages revolves around one material object, telling in riveting narrative prose the story of a medieval Four Gospels manuscript, beginning with its creation in Hromkla in 1256 and concluding with the settlement of a court case between the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Western Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of Armenia over ownership of the manuscript’s canon tables (eight folios), which were removed from the codex during the Armenian Genocide. The book alternates between different genres: academic study, investigative journalism, autobiography, travelogue, and even historical fiction (a passage set off in italics at the start of each chapter imagines a scene set in a different locale from the manuscript’s past). All in all, it is a gripping page-turner, giving the reader a feeling similar to that experienced when reading a mystery novel.

2A material object lies at the heart of this book. The prologue opens with the lawsuit against the Getty filed in 2010, with the author detailing her own personal response to the high-profile case and how she came to write this book, which she defines as “the saga of the Zeytun Gospels, of a sacred relic and an art object, of the fragment and the whole, of its perilous journey through time and space, [which] mirrors the stories of survivors and refugees and their paths toward remaking their lives and creating new futures. The story of a trafficked object and of its people reveals much about the nature of survival and how art and cultural heritage are central to it. This book tells the story of the Zeytun Gospels, the paths it crossed and the places it encountered along with the Armenian people, as well as the gaps and mysteries that still shroud its journey, and likely always will” (p. 18).

3The first chapter, “Survivor Objects: Artifacts of Genocide” frames this lawsuit in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century conflict “between the goals of museums and the claims of indigenous and faith-based groups and source countries” (p. 37) and advances the terminology of “survivor object” to name such material objects that “experienced genocide and survived”, which like the survivors of the genocide themselves “bear the marks of its violence” and “acquired the power to recall the horror of genocide, to recollect the absent persons and objects that the Holocaust consumed” (p. 40).

4Chapters 2-8 are organized around the different locations where the Zeytun Gospels moved over the almost eight centuries of its history: Cilician Hromkla, then the seat of the Catholicosate, where Catholicos Constantine I commissioned its creation by Toros Roslin (pp. 48-78), Zeytun, where it resided after the Fall of Cilicia until 1915 (pp. 79-115), Marash, where it was transported by the survivor Asadur Ishkhan Surenian and remained until 1923 (pp. 116-156), post-genocide Aleppo (pp. 157-189), twentieth-century New York, where the Canon Tables of the Zeytun Gospels were brought, likely in 1923 (pp. 190-224), Soviet and post-Soviet Yerevan, where the Zeytun Gospels reside today as Matenadaran ms. 10450 (pp. 225-260), and present-day Los Angeles, where the Canon Tables form part of the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum as ms. 59 (pp. 261-299). An epilogue telling the author’s own “pilgrimage” (p. 300) to see the Canon Tables in the Getty Museum rounds out the volume.

5In each of these chapters, Watenpaugh makes use of an impressive array of sources from a variety of languages and periods – archives, manuscripts, court cases and statutes, primary print, and secondary studies – to not just tell the history of the Armenian people in the various places where the Zeytun Gospels and its Canon Tables have sojourned, but to bring that history to life through vivid narration, vignettes, and sometimes imaginative reconstruction. In so doing, a rich background is provided for understanding the journey of the Zeytun Gospels in its various contexts. Likewise, through the prism of this one material object, readers are presented with an accessible history to the Armenian people over the last 750 years.

  • 1 “When Mass is celebrated, the Bible is placed on the altar next to the holy cross” (p. 66) and “A m (...)

6Chapter 2, “Hromkla”, tells of the multicultural society of Armenian Cilicia and the various streams from which the master artist Toros Roslin drew in order to create the Zeytun Gospels, the artist’s “first known work” (p. 57). This chapter reflects on the importance of the Gospel Book as material object and attempts to reconstruct the object in its medieval setting, including an explanation of the role and function of Gospel canon tables, a system of indexing parallels between the four versions that was developed by Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century (pp. 72-73). Unfortunately, there are a few misleading statements in this chapter, due to slippage between terms and imprecise terminology, for example, between “Bible” and “Gospel Book” (pp. 65-67).1 Full Bible manuscripts are quite rare in the Armenian manuscript tradition, which instead copied various parts of the Bible together in different groupings, giving rise to various partial Bible manuscript types. Among these, the Gospel Book or Four Gospels (Աւետարան), of which the Zeytun Gospels is one example, is the most popular among all extant manuscripts. Otherwise, Watenpaugh’s explanation of the importance of the Gospel Book as material object in the Armenian tradition is crucial for understanding its role in Zeytun as relic and sacred object, which forms the subject of chapter 3. Here, through houshamadyans (“memory books”) and other sources, Watenpaugh reconstructs the “Lost World of Ottoman Armenians” (p. 79), specifically in Zeytun, to reveal the Gospel book’s role as a sacred object in the mountain village. This is one of the book’s most successful chapters, as the author brings to life the ethos and mores of the mountain lords who protected the holy book and were protected by it for many centuries. Readers will be enthralled by the vivid characters of Zeytun who come to life in Watenpaugh’s narration. While the author discusses the value of manuscript colophons (pp. 68-70) and makes use of some of them in the Zeytun Gospels – including Roslin’s own colophon as well as later ones made throughout the centuries – for her reconstruction (pp. 57, 69-70, 84-85, 104-105), she includes only the briefest quotations from the colophons themselves. The early chapters could have been enriched by translations of large extracts from the colophons themselves (or the entire colophons placed in an appendix), to give more of a voice to the figures from the past who made, owned, and interacted with this book.

7Chapter 3, “Marash”, tells of the Gospels’ sojourn there, how it was coerced out of the hands of Zeytun’s lord, Asadur Ishkhan Surenian, by the learned medical doctor, Artin Der Ghazarian, who sought to preserve it from what he believed was certain destruction when the Zeytuntsis were to be compelled into further exile. Here, the reader struggles with Der Ghazarian over thorny moral and ethical questions. As Watenpaugh explains, “Had the young doctor not recognized the Gospels for what it was, had he been less persistent in borrowing the Gospels from the ishkhan, who clearly did not wish to part with it, it is a near certainty that Roslin’s masterpiece would be lost to history” (p. 125). Was Der Ghazarian right to deprive Surenian of the sacred relic, as the Surenian family sought in vain for this precious object, which they believed “would have protected them from the horrors of the genocide – as indeed it had until then” (p. 125)? In any case, the Surenians went off to their deaths, and one will never know whether the Zeytun Gospels could have preserved them. One imagines the possibility of them using it to barter in exchange for their lives. The chapter goes on to relate in moving prose the Battle of Marash in 1920 and how the Zeytun Gospels was lost in the melee, as French troops abandoned the Armenians to destruction at the hands of Turkish soldiers. Watenpaugh reviews the fragments of evidence for what happened next: the Turkish man who evidently picked it up and held onto it for months before showing it to an Armenian dentist acquaintance, Melkon Atamian and the prelate of Marash, Khachadur Der Ghazarian, who bought it back from the Turkish man. When they had to leave Marash in 1923, they left the manuscript with an American missionary, Reverend James Lyman, but not before Melkon Atamian’s thirteen-year-old son, Hagop, “ripped out” the Canon Tables (p. 149). The next chapter, “Aleppo”, is an important sequel to this chapter, revolving around the work of Father Ardavazt Surmeyan, the archbishop of Aleppo, who did his best to tend to the survivors and survivor objects of the genocide who turned up in Aleppo. At some point when the manuscript was still intact, Surmeyan described the Zeytun Gospels, noting its illuminations and recording its colophons, which was eventually published in his manuscript catalog of 1936, where the interested reader may access the colophons in their entirety.

8Eventually, the Zeytun Gospels made their way to Istanbul, in the charge of the Armenian patriarchate, while the Canon Tables sailed across the Atlantic with the Atamian family, who settled in New York. Chapter 6, “New York”, relates the study of the Canon Tables by Archbishop Karekin Hovsepian, to whom the Atamians showed the Canon Tables, as well as the study of Sirarpie Der Nersessian, who studied the Zeytun Gospels (without the Canon Tables) at the library of the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul. The next chapter, “Yerevan”, focuses on the modern, nationalist reception of Toros Roslin in Soviet and post-Soviet Armenia, as representing “the glory of medieval Armenia, adopting ideas from Europe and translating them to his own idiom […] a meeting point of East and West […] a maker of the Armenian nation” (p. 260). The final chapter, “Los Angeles”, takes up the litigation itself and offers a balanced perspective of the arguments and claims of both sides in the dispute. Here, Watenpaugh is to be commended for her objectivity and her careful evaluation of the claims and counterclaims of each side and the pros and cons of the ultimate outcome, as well as alternative outcomes that were not to be. Watenpaugh’s book is not only a success but a fascinating and pleasurable read and will be of value to students and scholars of art history and Armenian studies, as well as a general public with an interest in cultural heritage, art, and antiquities.

9Some may take issue with the bold claim made by the last word in the subtitle of the book (“Justice”). Many in the Armenian community were disappointed with the settlement reached by the two parties to the case, wherein the Getty “acknowledged the church’s ‘historical ownership’ of the Canon Tables and the church acknowledged the Getty’s ‘decades-long stewardship’ of the Canon Tables and agreed to donate the pages to the Getty ‘to ensure their preservation and widespread exhibition’” (pp. 283-284). Nevertheless, one is left wondering what a perfect solution to the case could have been and if a perfect solution is even possible. Ultimately, the book begs the question: what would justice look like for a genocide survivor object? Is justice possible after genocide?

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Notes

1 “When Mass is celebrated, the Bible is placed on the altar next to the holy cross” (p. 66) and “A manuscript of the Bible occupies a privileged place in Armenian culture as ‘the religious object par excellence, comparable to the reliquary in Western Catholicism and the icon in the Greek Orthodox church’”, (p. 67, italics mine). Here, instead of “Bible” it should read “Gospel Book”.

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Référence papier

Jesse Siragan Arlen, « Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice »Études arméniennes contemporaines, 16 | 2025, 200-204.

Référence électronique

Jesse Siragan Arlen, « Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice »Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 16 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 04 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/4080 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15gmo

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Auteur

Jesse Siragan Arlen

Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center, Diocese of the Armenian Church of America (Eastern), Orthodox Christian Studies Center, Fordham University

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