GLENDALE—University of California, Davis Art History Professor Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh will be in town to present a special illustrated talk titled, Rediscovering Zeytun: The Legends and Art Treasures of the “Eagle’s Nest,” on occasion of her newly released book, “The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript.” The discussion will take place on Saturday, October 19 at 7:30 p.m. at Abril Bookstore, located at 415 E. Broadway, Glendale, CA 91205. Admission is free. For more information, call 818.243.4112.
The town of Zeytun holds a unique place in the modern Armenian imagination. In the late Ottoman period, this stronghold in the Taurus Mountains became famous for its resistance to the centralizing state authority. Zeytun looms large in Armenian literature, where its “freedom-loving” spirit is celebrated, and in works written by European observers, as well as representatives of the Ottoman, and later, Turkish Republican states.
Like many Ottoman Armenian communities, Zeytun was largely destroyed by the early 1920’s and little remains of its material culture today. Heghnar Watenpaugh will share her research on Zeytun, its architecture, its legends, and its sacred spaces, as well as its art treasures. A rare surviving relic from Zeytun, a fragment of Toros Roslin’s Zeytun Gospels, is located at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Heghnar Watenpaugh’s book on the Zeytun Gospels, “The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript,” was recently published by Stanford University Press.
Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. She is the award-winning author of “The Image of an Ottoman City: Architecture in Aleppo” (2004). Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, and was featured in a BBC series about cultural heritage lost during the current conflict in Syria.
