Day 13: Finishing Manuscript Photography at the National Historical Museum
There. I said it. You now know where we’ve been photographing for the last three days. But I wasn’t the first to spill the beans. We have been at the National Historical Museum. They were very gracious to us, bringing us drinks without our asking and doing whatever they could to make this thing go well.
I can say this now because we are finished with the work, all the paperwork has been signed and they have agreed to allow us to make the images for these manuscript freely available. Fantastic! For more info on this, you might want to read Dan’s comment on the post linked to in the previous paragraph.
Today’s Work
Today we finished up the gospels manuscript that we started yesterday (GA 2451) then began one more manuscript (13th century gospel manuscript, AKA GA 2119). It is a very small manuscript, being only 10x7 cm in dimensions. Here’s a picture of our photography crew, with me in the middle holding it.
See the white gloves on Garrett’s hands? When touching the leaves of a manuscript, you are always supposed to be wearing gloves. I am not because I’m holding the cover, so the manuscript is being protected. So no, I’m not being lax and getting my grubby fingers on the mss :)
The very last task was to take UV photographs of a palimpsest (GA Lect 1687) of just a few leaves. That was interesting and different. Images were first taken of the manuscript in normal light then UV shots were made. The later text is not biblical, though we have not identified what it is yet. The earlier text is biblical, so after the normal shots we broke out the UV lights, turned off the regular lights and started shooting.
Next
Tonight we finish converting images from Raw to Tiff to Jpeg, confirm the images are good, and burn them to dvd to hand them off to the institution tomorrow. And it’s going to be a late night. After that we’re taking a break (it is the weekend, after all) and heading off to take in some islands. This will certainly be new for me. I’m very excited!
Random Funny
On the way back home today (but while still in Athens) we saw this gem. Clearly, someone needs to tell them that their sign is not going to be interpreted by some English speakers in the way they meant it.
I’m really not sure what they meant to do with that. Were they going for "Sweet Coffee" or "Southwest Eat Coffee". Regardless, funny.