Matenadaran

The largest book and the smallest book in Matenadaran. In the capital of the Republic of Armenia in Yerevan, on a small hill, there is a museum, which houses one of the largest repositories of manuscripts in the world, thousands of ancient archival documents, as well as the biggest and the smallest books in the world.The biggest book in Matenadaran weighs twenty-seven and a half kilograms, its size is 75 by 55 centimeters. This is “Musha's Sermons” book written around 1200 in Taron. Customer ordered a book for a priest named Vartan, which included speeches, chronicles, the lives of saints and panegyrics, selected pages from historical works, interpretations, and church canons. Vartan finished it in three years.It had 675 sheets, 28 kg of weight. Each page is one calfskin. When the book was ready, the customer was killed by the Emir Aladin, who appropriated to himself all the good things and of course the precious book. Two years later, Emir decided to sell the manuscript. The Armenians collected 4000 drahm and they bought the manuscript. The book contains a large list of people who participated in the redemption of this giant, decorated with rare miniatures. After being released from captivity, the manuscript for more than seven centuries lay in the monastery of the Holy Apostles in Mush, right up to the tragic events of 1915. The book was saved by two women. They could not take a huge book and had to split it up into two halves. The manuscript passed from hand to hand. One half went to Etchmiadzin. In the courtyard of the Armenian church near Erzrum, they accidentally found a buried second half of the manuscript. After long wanderings, both halves of the book joined to each other in Matenadaran. The 601 sheets of this manuscript are stored here, the rest 17 sheets are now in the Armenian Catholic congregation of Mkhitarists on the island of St. Lazarus in Venice.The smallest manuscript of Matenadaran is a church calendar of 16th-century , it's smaller than a matchbox, contains 104 parchment sheets and together with a cover weighs only 19 grams. Written in calligraphic handwriting by the scribe Ogsent, the calendar can only be read with a magnifying glass.