The Fragment and the Whole

Hagop Atamian was thirteen years old when his family encountered an acquaintance he later recalled only as “the Turk.”

It was in the aftermath of the Battle of Marash, a three-week massacre in the winter of 1920 that was part of a genocide that claimed more than half the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish man, during the brutal siege, had come across a rare object: an illuminated medieval manuscript, depicting biblical stories in exquisite miniature, whose power was so great that he began to have nightmares. In these recurring dreams, claims art historian Heghnar Watenpaugh, the man was instructed to return the holy book to its rightful owners.

The manuscript was the Zeytun Gospels, named after a remote mountain village in present-day southeastern Turkey, where the manuscript was kept from the sixteenth or seventeenth century until the start of the genocide. It was the Armenian scribe and priest Toros Roslin, a famed illuminator, who carefully crafted the book in 1256—the only sacred object to survive from the churches and monasteries in the area. Once in the hands of his family, the teenage Hagop became so captivated by the manuscript that, without anyone’s knowledge, he removed four sheets from the beginning of the book. He kept these eight pages—an illustrated gold-laden list known as canon tables—all the way to the United States, where, decades later, they would become part of Getty’s collections.

The sacred manuscript, enduring the upheavals of war, exile, and genocide is what art historian Heghnar Watenpaugh calls a “survivor object.” For the annual Thomas and Barbara Gaetghens lecture, part of this year’s Getty Scholars Program theme of “extinction,” Watenpaugh used the story of the Zeytun Gospels’ canon tables as a point of departure to explore the connections between art and genocide, how sacred items become artworks in museums, and how communities and art institutions can work together toward justice.

“The Armenian genocide was an attempted extinction, not just of a people, but of culture, and Heghnar’s ability to layer the art history of the past onto the living culture and human experience of the 20th century was particularly effective,” says Mary Miller, Director of the Getty Research Institute, “especially with the opportunity for people, many members of the Armenian community, to see the Zeyt’un Gospels’ canon tables.” That the lecture drew the highest attendance of any Gaetghens lecture, including many online audiences from around the world, speaks to the ongoing importance of this kind of dialogue between museums and their communities.

While the eight pages of the canon tables are now part of the Museum’s collection of medieval manuscripts, the main manuscript of the Zeytun Gospels eventually found a home in the Mesrob Mashtots Institute for Ancient Manuscripts, a public museum and research library in Armenia. Many Armenian intellectuals and faith leaders still consider the Zeytun Gospels manuscript and its canon tables to be sacred texts, part of a much greater history of erasure, that stood in for “a whole cultural universe of objects that were destroyed,” says Watenpaugh, in a genocide barely acknowledged by the wider world. “Simply for many medieval Armenian manuscripts,” Watenpaugh says, “their provenance is genocide.”

If the canon tables’ separation from the rest of the manuscript reflects the dispossession of the Armenians themselves from their homelands, Watenpaugh notes, its stewardship by the Getty presents a new opportunity for connection and repair—especially in a city with the largest Armenian community in the United States, many of whom are descendants of genocide survivors.

“We really feel it a privilege to be able to take care of and be the caretakers of these objects that are so incredibly important to the Armenian community,” says Elizabeth Morrison, senior curator of manuscripts at the Getty Museum. “Part of our mission is to share these Armenian objects and the idea of what medieval Armenian illuminators accomplished with the world.” As part of Watenpaugh’s lecture, special viewings of the manuscript were arranged, inviting many members of the Armenian community in Los Angeles to see up-close the intricate craftsmanship and luminous colors that have long entranced viewers.

The set of canon tables, as it changed hands over time, has lived many lives: functioning as a devotional object, priceless heirloom, research material, and finally, a work of art. Just as refugees are forced to reconstruct their lives in a new place, Watenpaugh writes, the manuscript too has remade itself. But today, displayed in the museum galleries on a regular basis, the pages can serve multiple purposes. “People who come and visit the manuscript have this aesthetic connection, but for many Armenians, it’s a religious connection. These are sacred objects that still hold that religious value for them,” says Morrison, “We often find people in the galleries actually reading aloud from these manuscripts, which is always so moving to me.”

The intentional destruction of cultural heritage is linked to discrimination and ethnic cleansing, and it is crucial to protect cultural artifacts like the Zeytun Gospels’ canon tables before they are lost forever. Museums, says Watenpaugh, can play an important role in preserving these kinds of survivor objects, sharing these rare objects through exhibitions and digital reproductions to reach more audiences than ever before.

To see the canon tables at the Getty Museum now, out of sequence from the rest of the manuscript’s pages, is unlike the experience of the book in its entirety. Instead, there is a crease formed from when the pages were removed and folded in half. We can imagine why a thirteen-year-old boy, preparing to leave everything he knew behind, would detach the pages from a rare, beautiful book—to save, in the face of loss, even the smallest folded pieces. “I’ve come to see this crease as a scar,” Watenpaugh says, “It marks the moment when the work became a fragment, the trace of its loss.” These marks are the evidence of the book’s passage through the world, a history that should not be forgotten. Along the seam of the gilded pages, where the threads once bound the book together, are a series of small, yet significant, holes.