Monuments of Book Culture: The State Hermitage Museum presents the exhibition “Life in Medieval Khorasan. A Geniza from the National Library of Israel”

On September 11, 2019 the State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg) is presenting the exhibition “Life in Medieval Khorasan. A Geniza from the National Library of Israel”.

The sudden appearance in the first years of the twenty-first century of the Afghan Geniza, hundreds of manuscript fragments from medieval Bamiyan (present-day Afghanistan), was a remarkable occurrence.

These pages of thick, soft, browning paper, covered in diverse texts in multiple languages, offered a window into lives and cultures far distant from our own, cultures that had flourished but later been almost totally destroyed.