The St. Petersburg Manuscript

Description

The writer Jan Dost traces the trail of a lost manuscript, written by Mahmud al-Bayzidi over two years, about the Kurds, their history, and the history of the entire region. He entrusted it to him at the ambassador’s request, so that the ambassador could send it to St. Petersburg, Russia, to be preserved in the Russian Academic Library. However, the manuscript’s journey, which began in Trabzon and then continued to the port of Beyd, takes an unexpected turn when bandits burn it page by page to keep warm. Despite the Circassian and Armenian pleas not to touch it at any cost, ignorance proved too great to understand its true value.