Pope Francis was able to appreciate at the Vatican a holy book written in Aramaic, saved from the invasion of the Islamic State in the Iraqi city of Qaraqosh and recently restored in Italy.
This is the sacred book “Sidra”, written in Aramaic around the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, which contains liturgical prayers for the feast of Easter and the Holy Cross.
The holy book belongs to the city’s Syro-Christian Church Qaraqosh, on the Plain of Nineveh, which the Pope will visit next March.
Meeting with a small group of restorers from the Federation of Christian Organizations of the International Voluntary Service (FOCSIV) took place on Wednesday, February 10, after the General Audience.
The manuscript was saved due to the “cunning of some priests in that city” in the face of the “iconoclastic and anti-Christian anger” of the Islamic State that invaded that land from 2014 to October 2016.
In January 2017, journalists Laura Aprati and Marco Bova found the holy book in Erbil, then it was delivered to the Archbishop of Mosul, Mons. Yohanna Butros Mouché, in the hands of LA FOCSIV volunteers.
Later, the book was transferred to Italy for its restoration, which lasted about 10 months, since it was in very critical condition, which required a preliminary examination and a linguistic comparison with some volumes from the same period. preserved in the library. .
In the near future, the holy book will be returned to the Syro-Christian Church in Qaraqosh.
The President of FOCSIV, Ivana Borsotto, stressed that “the recovery of the sacred book of Qaraqosh is part of the commitment that the Federation has dedicated to the reconstruction of the social fabric of a territory such as Kurdistan Iraqis and Iraqis “and added that the possibility that the people of the Nineveh Plain could continue to sing in Aramaic with this book will remind everyone” that another future is still possible. “
Translation and adaptation by Mercedes De La Torre. Originally posted on ACI Print