Bendery, September 10. /Novosti Pridnestrovya/. Very thick folios in dark leather bindings, darkened pages, letters of the ancient pre-Petrine times type. All this could be seen in Bendery, where master classes were held at the Old Book Restorer School in the Intercession Orthodox Old-Rite Church.
The first overview class in the ZOOM system was taught by Anna Muratova, an artist-restorer of the Tretyakov Gallery and the Museum of Moscow. Practical skills for reviving old books were given to Pridnestrovian specialists by Natalia Litvina, Head of the Interdepartmental Archaeographic Laboratory of Lomonosov Moscow State University, Senior Researcher in the archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
A collection of church hymns published at the beginning of the twentieth century is on a bookbinding machine. The book block itself is well preserved. Yet time has been less kind to the beautiful embossed leather binding, since there is no spine, the lower board is generally torn off, while the upper one is kept on the last threads. The book pages were cleaned of dust, the blood stain was removed - apparently, someone injured himself once and touched the page with a stained finger.
“The book worked a lot, people constantly prayed for it. Our task is to return it to its original form. To do this, we have to board the book again. We will now put on new cords and bind each copy,” Natalia Litvina says.
Natalia Viktorovna makes the first stitch herself. Following her, the Pridnestrovian participants of the master class are getting to tedious work.
Nearby on the light table are pages of a printed book of the 18th century. To cleanse the dirt accumulated over the centuries, they were rinsed with water several times. According to Natalia Litvina, there is no question of returning the original color to the pages.
“If it were an engraving, it could be made very graceful, but at the same time it would only be possible to touch it with white gloves. Therefore, our task is to make the pages durable. The book should work. We carefully remove the remnants of old glue, traces of drops of lamp oil ...” the restorer explains.
Master classes on the old books restoration were organized by the Orthodox Old-Rite community of the city of Bendery as part of a project to create a cultural and educational Center-Museum Old Russian Scribe funded by a grant from the President of the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic.
“When we faced the need to restore books, no specialists in this area were found in our republic at all. We had to look for them abroad. As a result, we came to the decision to apply to Moscow State University, whose specialists do very professional work,” Father Andrey, Rector of the Intercession Orthodox Old-Rite Church, told reporters.
According to him, the community owns about three hundred old books published in the 17th-20th centuries. Some of them will continue to be used for divine service, and some will form the basis of several exhibitions.
