Matenadaran

Address 53 Mashtots Avenue

Officially the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts, the Matenadaran is one of the great manuscript collections in the world — more than 23,000 documents in Armenian, Greek, Syriac, Latin, Arabic, Persian, and a dozen other languages. The collection covers theology, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, and history from the 5th century onwards, including the world's largest body of medieval Armenian literature.

The display gallery shows a rotating selection of the most beautiful manuscripts: vivid illuminated gospels, miniature painted Bibles, and astonishingly small books made for travelling monks. The fortress-like building at the top of Mashtots Avenue is itself worth a look, faced in basalt and approached up a long flight of stairs lined with statues of Armenian thinkers.

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A story
The Matenadaran's collection includes the 13-kilogram Homilies of Mush, the largest surviving Armenian manuscript. When Turkish troops attacked the village monastery in 1915, two women carried it to safety by splitting it in two — each half was buried separately and reunited decades later in Yerevan.