Matenadaran

The Matenadaran collection of manuscripts is one of the largest in the world. The repositories contain more than 17,300 manuscripts, more than 450 thousand archival documents, 3,000 ancient books. More than 14,200 books stored at the research institute are in Armenian, the rest are in foreign languages: Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, Persian, Old Slavic, Ethiopian, Japanese and others. Unique examples of translations are stored here, the originals of which have not been preserved in their native language.

Matenadaran was founded by Mesrop Mashtots and Sahak Partev in 405, in royal Vagharshapat. In 1920 Matenadaran became state-owned. In 1939 Matenadaran was moved to Yerevan. Construction of the Matenadaran building according to the design of Mark Grigoryan began in 1945, but from 1947 to 1953 construction was suspended. In 1953, construction resumed and ended in 1959. In the same year, Matenadaran became a research institute and moved to a new building. From 1982 to 2008 Academician Sen Arevshatyan has been the director of Matenadaran since 2008. to 2016 the director was Doctor of Philological Sciences Hrachya Tamrazyan. Nowadays the director of Matenadaran is Doctor of Historical Sciences Vahan Ter-Ghevondyan.

Working volumes of Matenadaran, provided for in 1959. today are no longer sufficient: 6,000 books have been added to the manuscript collections alone, and archival and library collections have increased exceptionally. In order to modernize storage and recovery systems and introduce new technologies, a new large scientific complex was built next to the main building of the Matenadaran.