Dear HMML Friends:

It has been a busy fall semester at HMML. In September I had the chance to represent us at the quadrennial Symposium Syriacum and Conference on Christian Arabic Studies, held this year in Granada, Spain. It was a unique opportunity to inform and excite the scholars most keenly interested in the manuscripts we are preserving in our projects in the Middle East and India. I was able to present two overviews of our work, one focused on the many digitization projects we have undertaken over the past five years, and another on the cataloguing efforts we are beginning this year to make those collections available. The Symposium/Conference was also an opportunity for HMML to show off its work in the new full-color printed facsimile of an important manuscript from our project with the Syriac Orthodox Church in Aleppo, Syria. This famous Syriac historical work, the Chronicle of Michael the Great, survives complete only in the Aleppo manuscript, which has been unavailable to scholars for more than a century. You can read more about this fascinating story in the current issue of Illuminations.

In October, I traveled to Ukraine with HMML’s Deputy Director of Manuscript Preservation, Phil Steger. We met with our partners at four major libraries in Lviv, which together hold 5300 manuscripts. Two projects are currently underway and we hope the other two will begin in 2009. Lviv is a unique place, on the frontier between the Latin religious culture of its Austrian and Polish past, and the Slavic culture of its surrounding region and present Ukrainian government. The collections are rich in Latin manuscripts, complementing HMML’s strengths in western Christian texts, as well as in Slavonic manuscripts from both Ukrainian Orthodox and Ukrainian Catholic traditions. The Soviets confiscated these manuscripts from churches, monasteries, and private libraries and deposited them in state institutions. Many of the manuscripts have yet to be catalogued, and we are eager to learn what may be discovered in these amazing collections. It's an important project, as many Eastern European libraries are on shaky economic foundations since the collapse of the Soviet Union, foundations further eroded by the current global economic slowdown. Our photographic preservation of these at-risk collections will ensure these documents will be made available to the world, and never be lost.

We then traveled to Georgia, where HMML's Director of Digital Collections and Imaging, Wayne Torborg, joined us for our first exploration of possibilities for work in that ancient nation. Despite Georgia’s war with Russia last August, we found the capital, Tbilisi, to be both peaceful and beautiful. However, contacts in the Ministry of Culture and the Patriarchate of the Georgian Orthodox Church informed us of the destruction of important provincial museums in the conflict zones. At the request of the Ministry of Culture we developed a proposal to digitize a significant collection of 700 manuscripts in Kutaisi, Georgia's second largest city, and to use that as a base for digitizing smaller, more vulnerable collections, including one in the Svaneti region on the border with Russia. All of these collections in the Georgian countryside must be considered "at risk." On August 24, 2008, a story in The New York Times (http://tinyurl.com/6ape2k ) reported that the sole manuscript of a unique lexicon of the Ossetian language might have been destroyed in the early days of the war. This has yet to be verified, though it remains to be seen what other cultural items may have been lost in the present crisis.

We remain optimistic about our prospects in Georgia despite the continued turmoil in the region. The recent Cabinet shake-up, a legacy of last August's war, has brought in a new Minister of Culture. We hope that he and his new team will recognize how HMML can help in the urgent effort to protect Georgia's cultural heritage. Meanwhile, we continue our conversations with other potential partners in Georgia.

The current struggles in places like Georgia remind us of the meaning of the chilling words "too late" and "lost forever." Through HMML's preservation work, we aim never to have to say these words about any of humanity's historical handwritten treasures. As I write these lines, I am preparing a report on our preservation efforts in Ethiopia for a national gathering of biblical scholars in Boston. Thank God we were at work in Ethiopia before their Revolution, though much was lost despite the good start we made. Thanks to you, our closest friends and strongest supporters, we have been able to resume our work there and to extend HMML’s mission to the places that need it most.

Yours sincerely,

Father Columba Stewart, OSB
Executive Director