The Kalkosi Gospel

In 1907 Georgian scholar Ekvtime Takaishvili was in a scientific expedition in Kola-Oltisi (historical part of Georgia, nowadays Turkey). The travel reports he published in the monograph “Archeological expedition in Kola-Oltisi and the village of Changli in 1907” in Paris in 1938. Among with other relics in his monograph Takaishvili describes the Georgian Gospel preserved in the village of Kalkosi, which in his words “was equally respected by Armenian and Greek population of the village”. The scholar dates the manuscript to the 13th-14th centuries and provides its basic data.
In 1996, the Kalkosi Gospel was purchased with the assistance of the presidential foundation and transferred to the K. Kekelidze National Centre of Manuscripts. Currently this manuscript is still kept at NCM (Q-1602)
and is available for the scholarly study.
The manuscript contains numerous inscriptions, the great part of them belongs to the late period, unfortunately the Gospel was in a very bad condition (damaged, decomposed and needed restoration) with missing pages. We do not know neither about the place of its copying, nor the time or the copyist. The manuscript has only a colophon which is common characteristic of the Gospels of George the Hagiorite’s redactions and it has also one extended inscription, which attests that once the manuscript belonged to the church of St. Nicholas (Solomonisi,the Kalmakhi fortress).
Later inscriptions, of which a great part belong to 15th-17th centuries, show the history of the manuscript and its relocation in different times and different historical situations. The colophons describe how manuscript transfers from Solomonisi to the village of Okami (St. Jacobs church), from Okami to Ortuli and finally to Kalkosi.
We would like to put special emphasis on the inscription done by the priest Darjan who narrates an interesting story in the colophon how he got the Gospel and some part of the
land as a gift from the lord of Uzuni after fighting and winning in a wrestling competition.
The manuscript has Russian and Georgian inscriptions from the period of Russo-Turkish war in 19th century and has also a very interesting Armenian inscription made in 1920 and written with Georgian graphemes which recounts that at that year the Manuscript was brought to Tbilisi to be sold by an Armenian from Kars and was shown it to an unknown Georgian scholar who dated the Gospel by 15th century.
As we already mentioned, by the time of its appearance at the NCM the Kalkosi Gospel had been quite damaged and needed some restoration and conservation works. The inscriptions show that the renewal of the damaged, dicomposed manuscript (mostly restoration of book-binding) occurred earlier too by different persons. Here we find one of the earliest (14th -15th centuries) mentioning of paleographic terms “mkindzavi, amkindzveli” which confirms that this term in Georgian book history was introduced rather early. It is interesting to note that the names of the restorers of later period of the manuscript are kept in other inscriptions.