![]() ![]() “While we’ve had long discussions with each of them, and while they haven’t said no yet, they also haven’t said that they would return the items either,” Tsougarakis told The Pappas Post. Many of the volumes dated back more than 1,000 years and were sold across Europe to various book dealers and collectors and never recovered.Īttorney George Tsougarakis - a partner with Hughes Hubbard & Reed, a New York City-based firm that is handling the recovery of the manuscripts on a pro bono basis on behalf of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople - said that his legal team has contacted each American institution to ask for the manuscripts’ return. In March 1917, as World War I was raging throughout Europe, a group of Bulgarian militants raided the monastery and stole the entire contents of its library, which had been filled with holy texts that included the oldest complete version of the New Testament in existence.īefore the looting, the library housed 1300 volumes, 430 of which were highly-valuable manuscripts. However, long before becoming pieces of American collections, these documents once resided in the Kosinitza Monastery - one of Greece’s oldest and most important Orthodox Christian religious sanctuaries - located in the northern region of Macedonia.Īlso known as Panagia Eikosiphoinissa (“twenty palm trees” in Greek), the monastery was built in 400 AD just outside the city of Drama and has a turbulent history including several massacres of monks, destruction of its buildings - and theft of the extremely rare manuscripts. institutions - Princeton University, Duke University, and the Morgan Library in New York City. A more contemporary example is the large collection of poet John Keats’ autograph poetry and transcript letters at the Harvard University Library.More than a century after being removed from a historic monastery in northern Greece, rare ninth-century Christian manuscripts have been located in the United States, where a team representing the Greek Orthodox Church is waging a tiresome legal battle to return them to the library from which they were taken.Īt the moment, eight of the sacred manuscripts sit among the library collections of three prestigious U.S. Rescued from the Nazi-seized art from the Austrian government by Baroness Rothschild, the work incorporates the artistry of master Flemish Renaissance painters. The most expensive manuscript to date is the "Rothschild Prayerbook," an illuminated book of hours created between 15. Library manuscript departments provide only limited access to these works because of their fragility. Often, antique manuscripts only exist in leaves and fragments, a sad but precious tribute to those who wished to preserve their contents for posterity. Original manuscripts are a primary source from the writer that has not been subjected to mass-market publishing. ![]() Manuscripts are often just as valuable, or more so, than a rare book. This documentation takes the form of letters, diaries, legal records, essays, plays, poems, on anything from notes on scientific research to articles on women’s rights. Manuscripts are included in most libraries and can be found in many private collections. Documentation that has not been compiled into books serves as an invaluable record of history and human interest in the form of manuscripts.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |