Comment from Bedross Der-Matossian

Hikmet Hajiyev, the Azerbaijani presidential spokesman, recently brought a group of diplomats to the Armenian museum at Gandzasar Monastery in occupied Artsakh, in what appears to have been a carefully staged attempt to “prove” that its Armenian manuscripts were fake. His evidence was remarkably simplistic: he flipped through several volumes, pointed out that only one page contained writing and an illustration while the remaining leaves appeared blank, and presented this as some kind of smoking gun.
The episode says far less about the manuscripts' authenticity than it does about Hajiyev’s apparent unfamiliarity with museum practice, archival preservation, and manuscript conservation. Blank leaves, incomplete codices, detached folios, conservation bindings, facsimiles, and reconstructed volumes are hardly unusual in manuscript collections. Presenting such features to diplomats as evidence of fabrication is not serious scholarship; it is political theater dressed up as expertise.
In the Gandzasar museum display, visitors encounter what at first appears to be a complete manuscript volume. In fact, the object is a specially produced exhibition facsimile. Only the page intended for display has been carefully reproduced from the original manuscript, preserving its text, illumination, and visual character. The remaining leaves are blank and serve simply to give the object the physical form, thickness, and presence of a bound volume.
This is a perfectly ordinary exhibition technique. It lets a museum present a manuscript in a visually convincing, accessible way while keeping the original safely stored and protected from prolonged light exposure, handling, humidity fluctuations, and other environmental risks. Reproducing only the page needed for interpretation also lets the museum highlight a particularly significant passage or illustration without incurring the expense or conservation concerns of producing a complete facsimile of the entire codex.
Against that background, Hajiyev’s supposed “discovery” is less an exposé than a demonstration of either ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation.
More troubling, however, was the reaction of the European diplomats who accompanied him. Their laughter at the display—rather than any apparent effort to understand what they were actually being shown—raises questions of its own, particularly given the long-running controversies surrounding Azerbaijan’s so-called “caviar diplomacy” and its cultivation of foreign officials and political figures. Whatever one thinks of Hajiyev’s performance, the willingness of visiting diplomats to participate in the spectacle is revealing in itself.
And there is an additional irony: the original manuscripts from Artsakh are preserved at the Matenadaran in Yerevan, one of the world’s major repositories of Armenian manuscripts. The objects displayed at Gandzasar were never required to function as substitutes for the originals. They were exhibition materials intended to convey the appearance and cultural significance of manuscripts whose authentic originals are preserved elsewhere.
Treating a museum facsimile as evidence that the underlying manuscript is “fake” is therefore not a serious historical or scholarly argument. It is propaganda built upon either a basic misunderstanding of museum practice or the expectation that the audience will not know the difference.

@ICAGS