After Five Decades of Safekeeping, 93 Iraqi Church Manuscripts Return to Akra

After Five Decades of Safekeeping, 93 Iraqi Church Manuscripts Return to Akra
The Chaldean Antonian Order of St. Hormizd has formally returned 93 historic manuscripts to the Diocese of Akra, ending more than half a century of custody that began amid instability and displacement in northern Iraq.

For the order, the transfer represents the completion of a protective mission rather than a simple change of ownership. The manuscripts were entrusted to the monks in the 1960s after Abdul-Ahad Rabban — then the order’s superior and later bishop of Akra — sought to prevent church heritage from being lost. The collection was to remain with the order until it could safely return to the diocese.

That custody involved repeated moves as conditions changed. The manuscripts travelled from the Monastery of Our Lady of the Seeds in Alqosh to St. George’s Monastery in Mosul, then to St. Anthony’s Monastery in Baghdad, before reaching the order’s headquarters in Ankawa in 2021. There, staff at the Scriptorium Syriacum undertook the laborious task of separating Akra’s materials from other holdings, cleaning pages, reassembling volumes, photographing and numbering them.

The diocese’s perspective is bound up with the recovery of a collection linked to its own institutional memory. Akra was once an independent Chaldean Catholic diocese, but conflict and population displacement diminished the local Christian presence; in 2018 it was merged with the Archdiocese of Mosul. The 93 manuscripts were handed to Archbishop Najeeb Michaeel of Mosul and Akra at a ceremony in Ankawa.

The original Akra collection comprised 97 manuscripts. Three of the four not physically returned have been identified in digitised Patriarchate archives accessible through the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library in Minnesota, while one remains missing. Abbot Samer Soreshow said the handover reflected “the continuity of the mission of the Church to safeguard its historical memory and preserve its heritage for future generations.”

https://brazil-test-hub.syndichain.com Brazil News Hub brazil-test-hub brazil-test-hub