From September 21, 2018 to January 13, 2019, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will host an exclusive exhibition entitled ARMENIA, presenting the historical and cultural heritage of the Armenian people: starting with the adoption of Christianity (4th century ) and the invention of the Armenian alphabet (5th century) to the 17th century. The exhibition will open on September 21, 2018, marking Armenia’s Independence Day.
Along with eighty-one selected samples from Armenia’s large museums – the History Museum of Armenia, Museums of the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin and the Matenadaran, the exhibition will also feature samples loaned from the St. Hakobyants Armenian Church of Jerusalem, the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia, the Mekhitarist Congregation of Venice, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, other cultural centres and private collections.
One of the 34 most valuable samples from the History Museum of Armenia, the 4th-5th century four-sided stela of Kharabavank (near the village of Ujan on the southern slope of Aragats) is of pivotal and exceptional significance in this exhibition, as a distinctive phenomenon of the Armenian culture and art, as factual evidence of its origin.
More than 140 samples included in the exhibition, with traces imprinted in different materials, forms and types, in the context of different times and cultural environments, will re-create the original chronology and the indiscrete course of those spiritual values that testify to Armenia’s permanent presence and contribution to world civilization.