In one of the suburbs of Damascus, underground there is a storage of books rescued from destroyed buildings. Over the past 4 years, volunteers have removed about 14 thousand books from the ruins.
The storage location is kept secret, as there are fears that it will become a target of bombing, and those wishing to join the knowledge must overcome the path under a hail of bullets to get into the underground reading room. It is called the "secret library of Syria" and is considered an important life resource. “In a sense, the library gave me back my life,” said Damascus resident Abdulbaset Alahmar in an interview with the BBC. - "As the body needs food, so the soul needs books."
Secret Libraries
Throughout human history, religious or political beliefs have led to the fact that manuscripts were kept secret - in hiding places or private collections. One of these treasures is the Kaveh Library.
In 1900, the Taoist monk Wang Yuanlu - the keeper of the caves - discovered a secret door that led to a crypt filled with thousands of manuscripts. He called them the Grotto of the Thousand Buddhas. The treasure was forgotten for almost a thousand years, and when the monk informed the authorities about it, they did not show much interest in the find. But the news quickly spread among historians, and soon the Hungarian Aurel Stein persuaded Wang to sell the manuscripts. Further, whole delegations from France, Japan, Russia came here, and most of the texts left their homeland forever. By 1910, when the Chinese government realized that the national treasure was sailing abroad, only a fifth of the cache remained.
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Despite this, many of the original manuscripts can now be seen: the digitization of the collection began in 1994 as part of the Dunhuang international project initiated by the British Library in cooperation with partners around the world. This means that, as one New Yorker puts it, “Sitting in a chair, divers can now study the world's earliest complete star map; read a prayer written in Hebrew by a merchant on his way from Babylon to China; see a picture of a Christian saint in the form of a Bodhisattva; examine a contract written for the sale of a slave to cover the silk merchant's debt; flip through books on fortune-telling written in Turkic runes."
No one knows why the cave was sealed: Stein argued that this way of storing manuscripts that are no longer used but too important to be thrown away is a kind of "sacred waste", while the French Sinologist Pelliot believed that it happened in 1035 when Emperor Xi Xia invaded Dunhuang. Chinese scholar Rong Xinjiang suggested that the cave was closed due to the threat of an invasion by the Islamic Karakhanids, which never happened.
Whatever the reason for the hiding of the manuscripts, the contents of the cave have changed history since they were discovered just over a hundred years ago. One of the Dunhuang documents, The Diamond Sutra, is one of the key Buddhist sacred treatises: according to the British Library, the cave copy dates back to 868 and is the earliest fully extant dated printed book in the world. It is a reminder that paper and printing do not originate in Europe. "Sealing began as a form of prayer, the equivalent of turning a prayer wheel or putting a note in the Western Wall in Jerusalem, but on an industrial scale."
Wing and prayer
The Vatican Secret Archives includes the 1521 decree of Pope Leo X on the excommunication of Martin Luther. The location of this cache is known, it was founded in 1612 and was the target of many conspiracies.
The secret archives of the Vatican contain papal bulls that are 1000 years old. This is featured in Dan Brown's novel Angels and Demons, in which a famous Harvard Symbolist battled the Illuminati. The collection is rumored to include alien skulls, documentation of Jesus 'ancestry, and a time machine called a Chronovisor built by a Benedictine monk to travel back in time and film Jesus' execution.
In an attempt to dispel myths, access to the repository has been opened in recent years. An exhibition of documents from the archives was exhibited at the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Pope Leo XIII first allowed carefully vetted scholars to visit in 1881, and many secret documents are now available to researchers, although public viewing is prohibited. The word "secret" in the name comes from the Latin word "secretion", which is closer to "private". In the meantime, most of the archives remain out of sight of scientists.
For example, they cannot read papal papers published later than 1939, when Pontiff Pius XII became Pope, and part of the archives relating to the personal affairs of cardinals from 1922 onwards.
Housed in a concrete bunker in a wing behind St. Peter's Basilica, the archives are guarded by the Swiss Guard and officers of the Vatican's own police. Such significant figures as Mozart, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Charlemagne, Voltaire and Adolf Hitler had correspondence and relations with the Vatican, there is a request from King Henry VIII to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon: when the petition was rejected by Pope Clement VII, Henry divorced her. which caused the breakup of Rome with the Church of England. The archives also contain the 1521 decree of Pope Leo X excommunicating Martin Luther, a handwritten transcript of the trial against Galileo for heresy, and a letter from Michelangelo in which he complains that he was not paid to work on the Sistine Chapel.
Another Brick in the Wall
Unprotected by armed guards, but forgotten for centuries, one collection in Old Cairo, Egypt, was kept quietly until a Romanian Jew recognized its importance. Jacob Zafir described the cache in 1874 in his book, but until 1896, when Scottish twin sisters Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson showed some of its manuscripts to Cambridge University researcher Solomon Schechter, the find was not widely known.
Almost 280,000 fragments of manuscripts were hidden in the wall of the Ben Ezra synagogue: later they became known as the Cairo Geniza. According to Jewish law, no manuscripts containing the name of God can be thrown away: those that are no longer in use are kept in the area of the synagogue or cemetery. The word geniza is derived from the Hebrew language and originally means to hide, but later it became known as the archive.
1000 years ago, the Jewish community in Fustat deposited their texts. And the Cairo Geniza remained intact. Medieval Jews hardly wrote anything at all - be they personal letters or shopping lists - without addressing God. As a result, we have a "frozen mailbox" of about two hundred and fifty thousand fragments, making up an unprecedented cast of life in Egypt from the ninth to the nineteenth century … No other records of those times, so detailed, simply do not exist.
One of the geniza researchers in Cambridge told The New Yorker how important the Cairo Geniza collection is to scientists. "This is not hyperbole, but now we know much more about the life of the Jews of the Middle East and Mediterranean in the Middle Ages."
Fragments show that Jewish merchants collaborated with Christians and Muslims, were more tolerant of them than previously thought, and anti-Semitism was less common than it is now.
Between the lines
Historian Eric Kwakkel has discovered "hidden libraries" in medieval book bindings.
In 2013, the Dutch medieval book researcher, historian Erik Kwakkel, described a "remarkable discovery" made by students in his group at Leiden University. “While the students systematically checked the leftovers in the library,” he says on his blog, “they found 132 notes, letters and receipts from an unidentified court in the Rhineland scribbled on small pieces of paper. They were hidden inside the binding of a book printed in 1577. " Paper in the Middle Ages was very expensive, nothing was thrown away, and therefore all the waste was used.
Thus, words not intended for posterity and hidden in bindings can still be read today. Such small notes relate us to medieval society, its realities and everyday life. While the technology needs to be improved, it hints at a process that could reveal the secret library in the library. "We could have access to a hidden medieval library if we had access to thousands of handwritten fragments hidden in bindings."
Marina Popova