Uma coletânea de orações entre manuscrito, impressão e amuleto
In 1512 Hakob Meghapart printed the Urbatagirk, or Book of Fridays, in Venice. It was the first book printed in Armenian. The collection itself had a manuscript history: a handwritten example survives from 1476. What changed in Venice was the means of reproduction. A scribe had to write out each copy separately. Type could reproduce the same setting many times while still giving readers a page that looked familiar.
The opening instruction explains the otherwise puzzling title. It describes taking a sick person to church on a Friday or Wednesday for readings. The collection opens with formulas asking for protection against evil and sorcery. A prayer attributed to Cyprian is followed by the story of the maiden Justina. The book also includes a passage from Gregory of Narek’s Book of Lamentations and readings drawn from the four Gospels. Their sequence helps explain how illness, fear and hopes for recovery could be understood through scripture, storytelling and prayer.
Certain prayers contain a deliberate blank in the printed line. A reader could enter the owner’s name there by hand. Two impressions from the same setting of type could thus address two different people. This feature helps explain the book’s use as an amulet: an owner might attribute protective power to a text bearing a particular name. The gap records a task that printing left to the individual user.
The book comprises 62 paper leaves, or 124 pages. The pages have no printed numbers. Armenian letters mark the gatherings, groups of folded leaves that a binder assembled in order. A supplementary gathering headed Vasn gani bears the doubled Armenian signature ԳԳ. Its position varies among surviving copies. A digital viewer’s image number is therefore a poor reference for locating a passage in another copy. A heading and a gathering mark provide better evidence.
The block of type measures about 11 by 6.5 centimetres. Its rounded letters evoke the Armenian manuscript hand known as bolorgir. Red printing distinguishes the opening and selected passages from the main black text. Eight designs recur around the headings. A frame marks a textual division, while a narrative woodcut can anticipate the subject a reader will encounter next.
One illustration shows a hooded cleric holding a book beside a sick person’s bed, accompanied by two other figures. Read alongside the opening instruction, the image suggests who might read the book aloud and in what setting. In another print a cleric holds a snake near the text concerning snakebite. At the end, a different kind of image appears: a circle surmounted by a cross and bearing the Latin letters D, I, Z and A. This is a printer’s device identifying the workshop. The three pages reproduced in the gallery allow these functions to be compared.
The Urbatagirk belongs to a group of five known Venetian books by Meghapart. Its companions include a missal, the Aghtark, the Parzatumar calendar and the Tagaran songbook. A priest following the liturgy, a reader consulting feast days and a singer seeking a verse made different uses of the same workshop’s products. The recurring printer’s device helps a bibliographer connect books even when their publication details are incomplete.
One National Library of Armenia copy, presented in the Library of Congress digital collection, is bound together with another publication of Meghapart’s, the Parzatumar, a calendar. Two publications can thus occupy a single physical volume. The Matenadaran also preserves a copy of the Urbatagirk. For the five-hundredth anniversary in 2012, Lusine Avetisyan prepared a scholarly edition with a transcription, study and Eastern Armenian translation in traditional orthography. A digital facsimile allows the reader to inspect the early page, while the modern edition makes its Classical Armenian text accessible in translation.