Silent Angel by Antonia Arslan Presented at Prelacy

Cautiously, the group approaches, “trying not to make any noise, though they needn’t have worried.” The priests are all dead.

The soul-searing description continues. Old Hovhannes Vartabed had also died “but he was fighting with an axe that softly rocks in the winds stuck in his chest, like an evil definitive banner of victory. The killer had left it in him like a trophy.” A third old monk Tateos, has also been killed. The scared group of five check out the ruined atrium, cells of the monks and the refectory. But all are empty.

“They bury the three monks with their feet pointed east, and place one cross — two branches hastily tied together — in each of their crossed hands.”

Dr. Arslan describes the finding of the ancient parchment. “There is something on the ground, a flat and rectangular form, from which brilliant colors transpire, like jewels.” Eleni who has discovered it wonders if the monk Tateos whose dead body lay before it, “may have tried to divert attention from something that he had hidden in the darkest corner of the room.”

The book “had crossed seven centuries – symbol of a civilization and a pledge of devotion, a veneration of the words of the ancients and of the images painted in the illuminations, the survivor of a culture and a world that was now disappearing in the fire and flames of senseless destruction,” the author continues with poetic compassion. There is a reason why it has come into their hands. It means that the angels who watched over it decided to give it not to wise priests,…but expressly to them.”

Kohar says, “The book will come with us We will take turns carrying it. But first of all let us all swear that we will protect it with our lives, from any insult or profanation (irreverence). They all solemnly swear.”

Too heavy for one person to carry, the two Armenian women cut the sacred book in half and each carries half on her back during their perilous journey replete with sickness, fatigue, starvation through steep mountains and destroyed valleys, to save it from the Turks. One half reaches Echmiadzin.

During the tortuous trip Kohar dies, after she had wrapped her half in cloth and buried it in a churchyard in Erzerum. It is finally found by a Polish officer who was fighting in the Russian army, and eventually brought to the Matenadaran where both halves were united in the 1920s to rest eternally in peace.

In the 19th century, a few pages had been removed, and are preserved in the collection of the Mekhitarist Fathers in Venice and Vienna.

Ignatius Press, which published Silent Angel, has commented, “Antonia Arslan tells this story with intense compassion and clarity taking the reader on a desperate search for truth and salvation.”