One of the oldest extant hand-written gospels, written in Greek between the end of the 10th century and the start of the 11th, is on its way to being returned to the monastery it was stolen from in northeastern Greece by its latest owner, a museum in Washington, DC, the Metropolis of Drama said, ANA reports.
The document was stolen in 1917 by the Bulgarian occupying army from the historic monastery of the Virgin Eikossifinissa (“the luminous red one”), constructed on Mt. Pangeon, and it is the second manuscript after the 9th-century Codex 1424 to have been returned to the monastery. The codex was returned in 2016 by the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago.
The recently identified manuscript includes miniatures and depictions of the Evangelists and is written in two columns with 27 lines per column. The columns measure 18.1 cm by 14 cm.
After a circuitous route, the 10th-century vellum gospel ended up at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC which notified the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in January that it was one of the objects stolen during World War I. Bartholomew, the Metropolis said, allowed the museum – which receives a million visitors a year – to exhibit the manuscript until October 2021 and will also lend another three manuscripts from the patriarchate as a gesture of goodwill.
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