By Jacob Comenetz
Living in DC, the National Library of Georgia isn’t around the corner. But here in the U.S. capital, we have in our backyard the world’s largest library, the Library of Congress, and with it, the significant Georgian treasures in its collections.
On a sunny Friday afternoon in late September, the Georgian Association in the USA made a first foray towards making those Georgian treasures a bit easier to access when it organized an exclusive meeting with the Area Specialist for Georgia and Armenia, Dr. Khatchig (Khachador) Mouradian.
A small but enthusiastic group led by Georgian Association president Salome Tsereteli-Stephens met in the ornate Thomas Jefferson Building lobby before being guided through labyrinthine corridors to the African and Middle Eastern Division Reading Room. This research center’s Near East Section serves as the main access point for study of the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East.
The magnificent high domed-ceiling Reading Room already offered a striking sampling of reference works on Georgia and in Georgian, including a variety of bilingual dictionaries and books on the Georgian language in German, French, and English. One could have spent much time taking this all in, but soon we were beckoned to an intimate meeting room where Dr. Mouradian had prepared an introduction to the Library’s Georgian holdings, featuring some of its most treasured works.
Dr. Mouradian, who in additional to his LoC role is a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, and an award-winning author with a long academic career in regional studies, first told us a bit about the nature of his work within the Library, how collections are acquired, maintained, organized, accessed. The history of the collections’ development, with a rapid growth spurt mirroring the emergence of the independent Georgian republic in the 1990s, warrants its own treatment; and indeed Levon Avdoyan, the longtime Area Specialist for Armenia and Georgia who played a major role in this area over 41 years before retiring in 2019, published two valuable blog posts on the Library’s Georgian collections in 2017 and 2018. The group also remembered and honored Dr. Paul Crego, who served as Senior Cataloging Specialist, has studied Georgian since 1977 and, until retiring in 2019, saw to the growth of Georgian collection at the Library.
While Dr. Mouradian’s presentation also included a colorful sampling of contemporary Georgian books, including cookbooks, the main attractions were undoubtedly the early works, beginning with the first two books in Georgian published in moveable type.
Printed in Rome by the Propaganda Fide press in 1629 and giving insight into the Georgian language to support missionary activity, the books’ publication was supported by the Georgian Orthodox priest, politician and ambassador to Rome Nikoloz Cholokashvili.
Other historic treasures prepared by Dr. Mouradian included an 1888 richly illustrated volume of Shota Rustaveli’s epic poem ვეფხისტყაოსანი – vepkhist’q’aosani (The Knight in the Panther’s Skin), featuring artwork by Hungarian artist Mihály Zichy;
and a Georgian translation, also with exquisite illustrations reflecting Georgian cultural influence, of the Persian epic შაჰნამე -Shahnama (The Epic of Kings), published by Tbilisi State University in 1934 to mark the epic’s thousand-year anniversary.
Though the brief engagement with these works was indeed thrilling, our appetites were merely whetted for further exploring the Library’s vast Georgian collections, spanning media and centuries. With sustained interest on all sides, more such opportunities may be in the offering.