The Restoration Pipeline
The Matenadaran restoration department's workflow follows a standardised three-stage pipeline that books traverse from the storage vaults to the restorer's bench. Stage one: biochemical laboratory. Books arriving from the dark shelves of the storage vault first enter the biochemical lab, where they become, in the institutional vocabulary, "patients" requiring detailed examination. Biologists sample the books to determine whether they are infected with fungi, bacteria, or other microbiological contamination, and to identify any specific "illnesses" the books carry. If microscopic-scale danger is detected, the book proceeds to a deeper disinfection phase.
Stage two: dust-removal and disinfection. Dust accumulated over years -- often decades or centuries -- is removed using fine brushes, with the operator working delicately page-by-page to avoid damage. The book is then placed in a specialised cabinet where plant-based liquid vapour penetrates the pages, removing contamination that is invisible to the eye and to the brush.
The cleaning-agent recipes are drawn from ancient manuscripts and medical texts (in the Armenian "bzhshkaran" tradition) and adapted for contemporary restoration use. The structural significance of this sourcing: the cleaning chemistry deployed in the restoration of Armenian historical manuscripts is itself drawn from Armenian historical textual sources, producing a self-referential institutional architecture in which the cultural-heritage object's preservation employs the cultural-heritage tradition's own knowledge.
Stage three: the restorer's bench. Only after the biological assessment and the dust-and-vapour cleaning is the book delivered to the restorer for the specific binding-and-paper restoration work. The restoration work itself is conducted at the individual restorer level, with each book passing through the hands of a single restorer for the duration of the restoration project.
Amalya Apresyan: Custodian of Storage and Pre-Restoration
Amalya Apresyan has worked at the Matenadaran since 2011. Her institutional role: custodian of the storage vault, with responsibility for organising the books in storage, removing accumulated dust, and bringing the books from the vault to the restoration department for the restoration pipeline.
Apresyan's testimony, as documented in the May 23 Hetq feature: "I cannot describe what I feel -- not every person is fortunate to even see them up close, and I look after them, take care of them, clean them. We have such a beautiful and rich heritage, it's a pleasure to work here."
The structural significance of Apresyan's role: the custodial function is the foundational institutional layer on which the entire restoration pipeline depends. Books that cannot be properly identified, retrieved, and pre-handled cannot enter the restoration workflow. The institutional knowledge required for the custodial function -- the cataloguing systems, the physical-organisation conventions, the handling protocols for varying book conditions, the cross-referencing with the broader Matenadaran research-scientific apparatus -- is built through extended institutional tenure and cannot be quickly transferred between custodians. Apresyan's 15-year tenure (as of 2026) represents the kind of institutional-knowledge accumulation on which the Matenadaran's long-term operational sustainability depends.
Anna Khaninyan: The 1785 Chashotsi Restoration
Anna Khaninyan is one of the restoration-department staff. Her current project: restoration of an 1785 Chashotsi -- the Armenian Apostolic Church liturgical book traditionally read during the meal-time (chash) services. The book's condition: wooden binding components missing in parts, the threads connecting the binding to the pages decomposed, the leather worn. The Chashotsi's specific liturgical function -- the book reads during the meal-time service portions of the Armenian Apostolic Church's daily-and-weekly liturgical cycle -- places it within the broader category of Armenian Church service books whose preservation maintains the continuity of the liturgical tradition.
Khaninyan's background: she arrived in Armenia from Russia three years ago, with prior professional experience as a painter and jeweller. The institutional pathway from artist-jeweller to manuscript-restorer reflects a transferable-skills profile that the Matenadaran has historically drawn from -- the precision-manual-craft skills, the patience for extended detailed work, the aesthetic-sensibility for the historical-period appropriate restoration choices, are all components of the artist-jeweller skill profile that translate effectively into manuscript-restoration practice.
The Hetq feature notes that restorers often become attached to the books they work on, and that parting with them at the end of the restoration project is difficult. The structural meaning: the restoration process is not a technical-mechanical operation that can be conducted at arms-length from the object. It is a sustained-engagement process in which the restorer develops detailed institutional and aesthetic familiarity with each specific book, and in which the restoration's success depends on the restorer's judgment about the specific intervention choices appropriate for the specific book.
The Matenadaran's Institutional Significance
The Matenadaran -- the Mesrop Mashtots Research Institute of Ancient Manuscripts -- is the Armenian state-funded institution responsible for the preservation, study, and public communication of the Armenian manuscript heritage. The institute's collection includes thousands of Armenian manuscripts from the pre-modern period, plus substantial holdings of manuscripts in other languages (Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, Syriac, and others) that have entered the Armenian manuscript corpus through historical translation and acquisition.
The institute's public-facing function -- the museum-and-exhibition operation in central Yerevan -- is supported by the much-larger institutional infrastructure of the storage vaults, the research-scientific departments, the digitisation programmes, and the restoration department documented in the May 23 feature. The public visibility of the Matenadaran tends to be concentrated on the museum-display function; the restoration-department work that the May 23 feature documents is the institutional infrastructure that makes the museum-display continuity possible across the multi-decade and multi-generational time horizons that cultural-heritage preservation operates within.
For the broader Armenian institutional environment, the Matenadaran is one of the few state-funded institutions whose substantive mission and operational continuity has remained relatively stable across the political-cycle transitions of the past three decades. The institutional architecture is structured to operate on civilisational time-horizons (decades-to-centuries) rather than on political-cycle time-horizons (years-to-multi-year), with the consequence that the institutional work is largely insulated from the cycle-specific political-discourse environment.
Cultural-Heritage Continuity in the May 2026 Context
The May 23 Hetq feature on the Matenadaran restoration department lands in a campaign-period informational environment dominated by election-cycle political-discourse content. OWL's coverage in the May 20-23 window has been concentrated in the criminal-track prosecutorial pattern (Karapetyan, Tevanyan), the Russia-Armenia institutional escalation (Volodin, Shoigu, Rosselkhoznadzor multi-category restrictions, Rospotrebnadzor wine-and-brandy actions), the strategic-realignment dimensions (UK FCDO sanctions, US SMR nuclear-cooperation track), and the campaign-period domestic-political coverage (Civil Contract wealth declarations, Unity Wings comparative analysis, Akanates state-asset-politicisation documentation).
The Matenadaran feature sits within OWL's broader documentary scope as the cultural-heritage-continuity dimension that the political-cycle coverage operates against. The institutional work of preserving the Armenian manuscript heritage is one of the civilisational-continuity functions that sustain the longer Armenian institutional environment within which the May 2026 cycle's events take place. The Matenadaran's manuscripts -- the 5th-century Armenian-alphabet texts that established the linguistic-literary tradition, the 9th-century historiographical works that documented the early-medieval Armenian institutional environment, the 17th-19th-century church liturgical books that sustained the religious-cultural community through the late-Ottoman and Russian-imperial periods -- collectively form the documentary record on which the contemporary Armenian institutional identity rests.
The May 23 feature's documentation of Apresyan's custodial work, Khaninyan's 1785 Chashotsi restoration, and the broader restoration-department workflow is, in this analytical frame, the campaign-period reminder that the institutional environment within which the cycle is operating extends substantially beyond the campaign-period's discursive scope. The work of restoring the 1785 Chashotsi, which began in the immediate-post-Russian-imperial period and continues in the post-Velvet-Revolution-and-post-2023 Armenia of 2026, operates on a different time-horizon and a different institutional-stakes scale than the campaign-period political-discourse content.
What We Are Watching Next
Three indicators will define the post-cycle institutional environment's engagement with the Matenadaran's broader institutional sustainability. (1) Whether the post-June-7 Government's cultural-heritage budgeting sustains or expands the Matenadaran's funding base. (2) Whether the Matenadaran's digitisation programme produces accelerated public-access to the manuscript collection through the institutional digitisation infrastructure. (3) Whether the broader Armenian cultural-heritage institutional architecture (Matenadaran, History Museum, National Gallery, regional museum network, archaeological-research institutes) receives the kind of post-cycle institutional attention that would sustain the civilisational-continuity infrastructure at the level the historical-record significance of the holdings warrants.
The Hetq May 23 Matenadaran feature is the kind of documentary-record content that operates outside the standard political-discourse cycle but sustains the longer-trajectory cultural-heritage continuity. OWL covers content of this kind because the institutional architecture within which the political-discourse cycle takes place is the broader civilisational-continuity infrastructure of which the cultural-heritage institutions are central components.
Sources: Hetq.am article 181568 ("Those Who Save the Manuscripts of the Matenadaran," by Frunze Avetisyan, Artsvik Davtyan, and Anya Sarkisova, published 2026-05-23 12:30, primary source for the restoration-department workflow documentation, the Amalya Apresyan and Anna Khaninyan profiles, and the 1785 Chashotsi restoration project reference). Matenadaran (Mesrop Mashtots Research Institute of Ancient Manuscripts) institutional documentation. Historical-record sources on the Armenian Apostolic Church Chashotsi liturgical-book tradition. All factual claims sourced to the named Hetq feature; OWL editorial framings on the restoration-pipeline structural analysis, the institutional-significance analysis, the cultural-heritage-continuity contextualisation within the May 2026 cycle, and the watch-list indicators are clearly identified as such.