The Zeytun Gospels: A Manuscript’s Survival After the Armenian Genocide

01 / Before displacement

The Zeytun Gospels were a book before they were a case

A detached manuscript page can be encountered almost as a self-contained painting. Its colours, balance and craftsmanship invite close attention. Yet a page also has neighbours: the leaves that came before and after it, the binding that held them together, and the community for whom the book mattered. Beginning with that larger relationship changes how we read the Zeytun Gospels.

The manuscript was written and illuminated by Toros Roslin in 1256 at Hromklay, also called Romkla, for Catholicos Constantine I. The Getty identifies it as Roslin’s earliest signed work. Its creation belongs to medieval Armenian artistic and religious history, centuries before the Armenian Genocide. [1]

That distinction matters. Armenian heritage must not be introduced only at the moment it was threatened. The book’s existence records an earlier world of skilled work, patronage, worship and learning. Remembering destruction requires attention to what people had built and valued beforehand. This is also the starting point of Exhibit G: Armenian Life Before 1915, which places communities and institutions ahead of the history of their loss.

What did the canon tables do?

Canon tables help readers locate corresponding passages in different Gospels. They are a system for navigating relationships within a text, not simply an ornamental preface. Getty’s exhibition material explains how artists arranged these references beneath painted architectural forms. In Roslin’s work, visual invention accompanied a practical reading function. [2]

We can therefore ask two questions together: how was the page made beautiful, and how was it used? Separating those questions risks turning a working religious book into decoration. Keeping them together allows artistic accomplishment and Armenian religious life to remain part of the same account. Our Artifact Collection exhibit offers another setting in which to consider objects through the lives and meanings attached to them.

02 / A history of forced movement

From Zeytun to Marash

The Matenadaran’s account places the manuscript in Zeytun for many years. It records Prince Asatur of the Surenyan-Basilosyan family taking the book to Marash during the displacement of 1915. In 1916, before his exile to Der-Zor, he entrusted it to the Marash physician Harutyun Ter-Ghazaryan. The account then records the manuscript’s loss during the massacre of Armenians in Marash in 1920. [3]

These dates prevent a misleading compression. A reader should not be left with the impression that the entire journey happened on one day in 1915, or that every change of possession was an ordinary sale. Nor should an institutional summary be expanded into a cinematic scene. The surviving outline is powerful enough without invented dialogue, imagined motives or a description of someone’s final moments.

For geographical context, explore the atlas’s Marash community record. It concerns local Armenian life; it is not a mapped reconstruction of this manuscript’s complete route. Connecting these resources gives readers a place to investigate further without making either resource establish more than its evidence supports.

The Armenian Genocide left 1.5 million Armenians murdered. A manuscript cannot stand in for those lives, and its survival cannot balance their destruction. It can, however, preserve a material connection to a world that the crime sought to destroy. The museum’s historical overview provides the broader setting in which this individual object’s story must be understood.

03 / Recognition and responsibility

Why the 2015 agreement needs careful wording

On September 21, 2015, Getty and the Western Prelacy announced an agreement concerning eight illustrated pages described as canon tables. Getty acknowledged the Armenian Apostolic Church’s ownership; the Church would separately donate the pages to the museum. The announcement states that the pages had been in Getty’s collection since 1994. [1]

It would be inaccurate to describe that outcome simply as the pages’ physical return to Armenia. It would also be inadequate to describe it merely as a museum retaining a possession. The recognition of ownership and the Church’s subsequent decision are central to what the announcement actually says.

There are different questions here. Who has cared for an object? Who has a historical ownership claim? Who is authorized to decide its future? Where is it physically kept? An answer to one does not automatically answer the others. Distinguishing them makes the Armenian claim legible rather than allowing the language of conservation to absorb the whole story.

This feature reads the published agreement as a historical record, not as a legal ruling on every disputed event in the manuscript’s past. A settlement announcement establishes the parties’ stated resolution. It should not be made to supply findings it does not contain.

A surviving object can remain divided

Getty’s 2025 discussion of Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh’s work locates the main manuscript at the Matenadaran in Armenia and the canon tables in Getty’s collection. It describes her approach to the manuscript as a “survivor object”—a way of examining art together with the upheavals endured by its communities. [5]

The phrase is useful when it opens questions rather than closes them. Survival is not the same as completeness. Physical preservation does not itself restore a book’s original setting, and a catalogue entry does not by itself repair the rupture between an object and a displaced community. Those are interpretive distinctions, not claims that preservation lacks value.

Readers may find a complementary perspective in our article on Armenian Genocide survivors as record keepers. A diary and a manuscript are different kinds of evidence, but both demand care for context, authorship and the circumstances through which they reached the present.

04 / Looking beyond a beautiful surface

How to read the evidence without flattening the story

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh’s The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice was published by Stanford University Press in 2019. UC Davis describes research that followed the pages across places and communities, bringing art history into conversation with displacement and the ownership dispute. [4] This article uses accessible institutional accounts of that research; it does not present itself as a substitute for the book.

For a reader encountering the subject for the first time, a useful practice is to identify what each source can establish before combining it with another. A date in a collection record, a recollection discussed in a lecture, and the terms of an agreement do not carry identical evidentiary weight.

These questions are useful beyond a famous manuscript. They can guide attention to a family photograph, a school certificate or a handwritten note. Before assigning significance, preserve the information that permits someone else to check the account. A small detail on a reverse side or an envelope may deserve to remain attached to the story even when it is less visually striking than the object’s front.

They also explain why the museum presents survivor testimony as a distinct resource. An object’s provenance and a survivor’s account can illuminate one another; neither should be silently rewritten to make the other seem more complete.

05 / Preservation as a continuing obligation

What remains to be held together

There is a temptation to end an object’s history at the point where it enters a museum: danger behind it, conservation ahead. The Zeytun Gospels resist that neat conclusion. Their story asks the reader to keep creation, devotion, forced movement, separation and Armenian ownership within the same field of view.

For an online museum, that means a beautiful presentation must help readers reach evidence. A heading should orient; a timeline should distinguish dates; an internal link should lead somewhere that develops the subject. Design becomes useful when it makes the record easier to examine rather than turning suffering into atmosphere.

The same care should shape how we connect different histories of Armenian survival. Our feature on the Ghazir Armenian Orphan Rug concerns a different object and different lives. Reading the two together can sharpen attention to making, survival and remembrance, without suggesting that their provenance or experiences are interchangeable.

The Zeytun Gospels are a reminder to preserve relationships as well as things: the relationship between a page and a book, an object and its community, a claim and its evidence. Where a connection has been broken, naming the break is part of responsible remembrance. Where the record survives, making it accessible gives future readers a place to begin.