Unique 18th-Century Georgian Bible Makes It Back to Harvard

Among the new acquisitions currently on display at Harvard’s library for rare books and manuscripts, perhaps the rarest piece, according to curators, is the first complete Bible printed in the Georgian language. It is one of few surviving copies of about 300 produced in Moscow in 1743 through the efforts of exiled Georgian nobles determined to preserve their ancient language and Christian tradition. 

The purchase — supported in part by the Davis Center’s Program on Georgian Studies, from a Netherlands-based bookseller — expands the university’s existing collection of Georgian historical and cultural artifacts, which ranges from religious manuscripts to 20th-century government documents to feature films. 

Here is the Bible’s story as told by two of the program’s scholars, current director Natia Chankvetadze and founding director Stephen Jones.

And if you are in the Cambridge area this month, come see it at Houghton Library! (After April 24, the Bible can be examined upon request at the library’s Archives and Special Collections Reading Room.)

Birth Pangs

Known as Bakar’s Bible, the beautifully bound tome was born of adversity. 

The trouble began 20 years before its printing. Not long after Georgians had succeeded in setting up a local printing press — assembling not just the technology but the language experts and metalsmiths to create the type — it was destroyed in an Ottoman military incursion.

Indeed, frictions with Georgia’s neighbors became so intense that in the 1720s and 30s, many royal family members ended up in exile in Russia. It was here that the Houghton-based Bible came into the world, midwifed by two sons of Vakhtang VI, one of several monarchs ruling separate kingdoms within Georgia.

The brothers, Bakar and Vakhushti, faced obstacles of all sorts. First, to set up a printing press in Moscow, they needed to import Georgian printers, scarce due to the absence of a functioning press back home. Then, they had to deal with the Holy Synod, the powerful ruling body of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was very particular about what could be printed. 

Things did not go more smoothly after the Bibles appeared. Getting permission from the Holy Synod to take some of them to Georgia took two decades. Documentation suggests that about 100 copies traveled over the Caucasus Mountains, though we don’t know for sure. 

The Bible at Houghton is presumably one of these; many of the ones that stayed in Moscow burned in the 1812 fire that famously greeted Napolean’s invading army.

A Century of Harvard-Georgia Connections

As we pored over the Bible, we realized it had been at Harvard before. On July 29, 1920, it was loaned to the college library by Robert Pierpont Blake, a linguistically gifted Harvard professor, classicist, and Byzantinist who had studied in St. Petersburg/Petrograd. From there, in 1918, Blake had gone to Georgia, where he stayed two years, teaching at Tbilisi’s newly founded university and eventually becoming one of the world’s most esteemed Kartvelologists — people who study Georgia — as well as the director of Widener Library. 

Blake’s scholarly task in Georgia, Christian since the 4th century, was to collect and collate religious manuscripts that would play a crucial role in the translation of texts from Greek, Syriac, and other ancient languages, quite a few of which he could read. 

When Blake retired from Harvard, Bakar’s Bible went back to his private collection, but the university would later play a major role in safeguarding Georgian historical documents from the unique period he spent in the country: its three years as an independent republic between imperial Russian and Soviet rule.

Official records from that short-lived government, including its constitution, had made their way to France, carried by Georgians fleeing the Bolshevik occupation in 1921. Here they were shared, in the 1960s, with Richard Pipes, an eminent Harvard Sovietologist, and future Davis Center director, who happened to be in Paris.

When 82 boxes of these materials finally came to Cambridge in 1974, they were added to Harvard’s library collections on one condition: that in 30 years they would be returned to Georgia whether it was independent or not. No one imagined then that just over a decade later the Soviet Union would get a new leader whose reforms would, by 1991, split the country into 15 independent states, Georgia among them. As agreed, the documents went back to Tbilisi; fortunately, they are still accessible at Harvard, now on microfilm.

Houghton curator John Overholt’s words about Bakar’s Bible apply here as well: “The reason we hold the materials that we do is to support research and teaching and to give people the opportunity to learn from these resources.”

Bible’s Rich Mine for Researchers

With the Bible back at Harvard, more people gain a new trove for studies of Georgian culture, language, history, politics, and social groups, as well as their impact and fate far beyond Georgia.

One area of interest is the Georgian in which the Bible is written, an ancient ecclesiastical script called nuskhur-khutsuri, decipherable only by experts, unlike the modern Georgian mkhedruli script.

Another is the inscriptions left by owners before Blake. These include the handwritten story of a boy born in 1851 to the aristocratic Tsereteli family, updated four months later to say he had died. An inscription from 1890 shows the Bible once belonged to Ilia Nakashidze and his wife, Nino, aristocrats and quite popular writers from the city of Kutaisi. An inscription on the first page is so difficult to read that understanding it will require the help of the Georgian National Center of Manuscripts.

Researchers are also looking at Blake’s papers to find out more about his life and his connection with this particular Bible.

We do not yet know of any other copy of Bakar’s Bible in the United States, so we feel very fortunate to have it. So, too, do members of the country’s Georgian diaspora, who have traveled from different cities to see the Bible and bear witness to the cultural heritage it preserves.