The Festive Homiliary Ms 4670 is considered to be one of the largest paper manuscripts (815 folios) housed in the Matenadaran. This manuscript was copied in 1401 in the city of Vostan (Vaspurakan), by the prolific scribe and artist of the time Tserun, with the monk Stepanos as the commissioner and the priest Sargis as the binder. The manuscript contains homilies, sermons, and admonitions by the Church Fathers, including John Chrysostom, Epiphanius of Cyprus, Ephrem the Syrian, Gregory of Nazianzus, Jacob of Serugh, and the Armenian Church Vardapets such as Hovhan Mandakuni, Petros Syunetsi, Catholicos Zakaria Dzagetsi, and Sargis Shnorhali. It also contais lifes of saints, martyrologies, various stories, and visions corresponding to the festive year of the church.
The manuscript is not illustrated except for the marginal ornaments on the first page and especially the lavishly illuminated headpiece (so harmonious with the cover) that opens the Story of the parents of the Mother of God, Joachim and Anne, read on Christmas Eve.
In the colophons of the manuscript, the scribe Tserun mentions his and the monk Stepanos’s parents, relatives, spiritual brothers, and his spouse, Arghun, who assisted him in creation of the manuscript and worked on polishing the paper (“…and [remember] my spouse, Arghun, who worked on polishing the paper”). At the end of the main colophon, Tserun records that the manuscript was copied in bitter and sorrowful times, during the conquest of Amir Tamur [Timur Lang], who in that year devastated Aleppo, Damascus and Baghdad, and left the Arab people in great sorrow.
The Homiletic manuscript was kept in the St. Paul-Peter Church in the city of Van, and was brought to Eastern Armenia in 1915.
The whitish paper attached to some of the folios and the textual additions suggest that the manuscript underwent restoration in the 17th century.
Before the present restoration, it was significantly damaged: the front and back pages were worn, there were traces of burning and soiling, the leather cover was scratched, the spine, threads, and seams were weakened.
Armine Melkonyan, a senior researcher at the Department of Manuscript Study, completed the academic description of this Homiliary. Artur Petrosyan, a senior restorer at Matenadaran, conducted the restoration of the manuscript (weighs 20 kg), which lasted three years and three months.