Matenadaran Director Responds to Hajiyev: “There Are No Blank Pages in Our History”

YEREVAN — “What ‘blank pages’ was Hajiyev showing diplomats at Gandzasar?”

Specialists at the Matenadaran have responded to this question with historical and scholarly evidence.

Gandzasar Monastery was built between 1216 and 1238 and served as an important Armenian spiritual, cultural and manuscript-writing center. Approximately 450 medieval manuscripts originating from Nagorno-Karabakh have survived to the present day.

Documents of exceptional historical significance relating to the history of Gandzasar are primarily preserved at the Matenadaran in Yerevan. The materials displayed at the monastery complex were exclusively reproductions of those documents.

Experts explained that a manuscript dating to 1232 was transferred to Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 14th century. The item displayed at Gandzasar—and later seen in Hajiyev’s hands—was a reproduction of a miniature from a page of the illustrated Targmanchats Gospel.

Matenadaran Director Ara Khzmalyan invited diplomats accredited in Baku to visit Yerevan, emphasizing that the global significance of the Armenian written heritage preserved at the Matenadaran is internationally recognized.