This is the story of the perfect black box.
And if it weren’t a real story, somebody would have to write it. In fact, it sounds almost like a fictional story – a story that seems so contrived, so fabulously, artfully fabricated that you’d think it couldn’t have happened outside of a novel or some historical mystery film.
But it did, in fact, happen!
…Or did it?
The black box at the heart of this story is an impenetrable one – one that’s never been opened. One that’s probably never going to get opened.
An unsolved mystery. An unsolvable one.
The perfect puzzle.
It is intriguing, fascinating, enigmatic, and it gives you a direct line to the distant past.
It can blow your mind. Or it can drive you insane.
It can be jolly good fun to ponder on a long evening on a beach somewhere with the person you love, but it can also mean you’ll tumble down a rabbit hole so deep you’ll never be able to climb out of it again. And it can really annoy you and drive you mad because you just want to know…but you can’t.
You can guess, of course. But who’s to say you’re guessing right?
We have to travel a bit to get to this black box, though. And for this, I’d like to take you on a journey with me, dear reader:
We will have to step into a time machine and travel to the past. Not the very distant past, mind (that’ll come later).
We will just travel to the mid-20th century for now: the time of petticoats and the ‘James Dean’ hairstyle, the age of Rock’n’Roll and the first Polaroid cameras.
The Cadillac has just got its iconic tail fins. British coins and stamps show Queen Elizabeth looking like a young film star. Oysters Rockefeller are the recipe of the hour. (Every other dish is just drowning in mayonnaise or gelatin – or both.) The Nouvelle Vague is on the brink of reaching French cinemas. Elvis is alive (yes, really). Everyone is having babies. Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor are out-sizzling each other on the silver screen. And no man would be caught dead going outside without a hat. (Fashionable headgear – that’s at least something to feel nostalgic about.)
But it’s also the time of the Cold War, the Sputnik crisis and the space race. The time of constant fear of a nuclear holocaust, the time Soviet tanks are deployed to Budapest and the Algerian War is cutting off the oxygen to the French Fourth Republic.
The US is feeling the aftershocks of the Korean War, and McCarthyism is strangling ideals of freedom of thought, speech and assembly. The Hollywood blacklist is a thing. The Hays Code is alive and well. Men who actually find Paul Newman hotter than Elizabeth Taylor are in deep trouble. The atmosphere at American universities is stifling, and some people are trying to push boundaries while others just incessantly slap them down…
I think we have dialled the clock of our time machine sufficiently back now to put ourselves in the right frame of mind.
What sort of music would you like to listen to on our flight?
Hang on…no, no, no, I’m piloting this time machine, and the pilot always picks the music. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. So, you will have to suck it up and listen to Francis Poulenc’s ‘O Magnum Mysterium’, which fits our topic today in so, so many ways (seriously, you’ve got no idea).
This is the first leg of our journey into the past. Take a deep breath now, dear reader, because that whole long trip is going to make you feel dizzy, light-headed and disoriented at times; we have a lot of ground to cover. But don’t worry, we will start our excursion into the past at one of the quietest, most secluded places on planet Earth, far, far away from the hullabaloo of modern life in the mid-20th century.
Are you ready?
Let’s open the door and exit our time machine…now:
In 1958 a man is working in a library.
Well, actually he’s working in his room; the books are brought to him, and he inspects them there, then he sends them back up to the library itself. Up and down and up and down those well-worn stairs the books travel, up and down those stairs that lead to the ancient tower where the cluttered old library is situated.
It’s an unusual library, not one of those big modern ones that you might know from your uni days. There are obviously no computers in it, and there isn’t even an index card filing system. The man has inspected more than 400 books so far, and most of those have never been catalogued before. The books are dusty and old and smell like nobody has opened them in quite a while. Some of them are strewn all over the floor of the library, some of them are stacked on its old wooden bookshelves.
The man is working away in deep concentration. He’s got three weeks to catalogue all the books in the library, and whilst doing so, he is inspecting them all with great curiosity. Some of them contain ancient marginal notes or handwritten annotations on flyleaves and end pages. Some of them have bindings that are made of old, recycled manuscripts. It’s a bibliographical treasure hunt of sorts.
Outside the wind is howling in the desert…
The library, we should say, is part of an ancient Greek Orthodox monastery, situated in the Kidron Valley of the Judean Desert, about halfway between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. The monks in it live a famously austere life, with no electricity and no running water. It’s called the Mar Saba monastery, and it’s one of the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monasteries in the world.
If you’re of the female persuasion, dear reader, you’re actually quite lucky right now that we’re invisible and came in a time machine: Women aren’t allowed to enter the monastery, and they won’t be in the future either – not even in 2024. The monks can’t be distracted and led into temptation by female charms, you see. (I’m guessing male beauty doesn’t count as temptation around here. Oh, how wrong they are! But more on that later…Anyway, sorry for the whispered side note; where were we?)
So…on this fateful day in 1958, nobody is disturbing the man as he works in the cell he calls his own for these three weeks. A monk is assigned as his chaperone and follows him around whenever the man wants to enter the library; the monk unlocks the heavy door for him and then later brings him the books he has picked to his cell. But right now, the man is alone.
We should note that the man himself is no monk; he’s an outsider, a visitor, an American professor. And we should probably mention the fact that he has been here before: In the 1940s, as a twenty-something university student, he had got stuck in Jerusalem while on a visit. Unable to leave because of the war, he had decided to travel the region and had visited the Mar Saba monastery in the process. It’s the library, that ancient, small, cluttered library up in the tower, that had got stuck in his mind.
That’s why he’s back here now. He wants to know what’s in it. He is a professor now, a historian and a bit of a manuscript hunter. He’s been inspecting books in old monasteries around the Eastern Mediterranean for a while already. (And if you know anything about the discipline, you’ll know that old manuscripts are actually hard to come by. Papyrus, for example, tends to rot when exposed to moisture. So, the most spectacular papyri tend to surface during archaeological digs in Egypt, where the dry climate is more conducive to preservation. The other source of ancient manuscripts are libraries – libraries where curious historians unearth manuscripts by examining palimpsests, book bindings and marginal notes.)
So, here he is now on this day in 1958, silently working in his cell…
…when suddenly it happens, the event that will change his life, that will make or break him as a scholar, the controversial find that will completely change how people in his field see him, the find that will drive modern-day historians, linguists, literature professors, palaeographers, church officials, theologians, amateur detectives and quite a few less-than-exactly-heterosexual people of a still systematically oppressed and mainly closeted community insane for many, many decades to come.
Let us savour this very special moment in history, dear reader. Let us walk up to the man in his plain monk’s cell and look over his shoulder…
He’s just picked up an old book off that stack his monastic chaperone brought him earlier, hasn’t he? Look!
And he doesn’t suspect a thing…
…or does he?
There are no other witnesses to this story. He is alone in his cell right now, and he will be the only one to tell this story later on. I will caution you along the way a few times, dear reader, that this man might be an unreliable narrator.
What is reality? What is fiction?
We don’t know. Let’s watch the story through the man’s eyes for now, shall we?
So…the man doesn’t suspect a thing. He doesn’t yet know what’s about to happen. He doesn’t know that scholars from many different academic disciplines will be thrown for a loop because of what he is about to lay eyes on.
He’s turning the book over in his hand right now, isn’t he? Inspecting it.
The book has no cover and no title page. Shame. But that happens sometimes with old books.
If he were less brilliant, less sharp, less well-read, then he would probably just put the book back on the pile on account of it having no title page; perhaps he would tell himself he’d get back to it later, then forget about it and thus miss his chance at fame (or infamy).
But this man is brilliant…
He is insanely well-read, clever, sharp-witted (and even sharper-tongued). Anyone who has ever met him describes him in these terms and also invariably adds that he ‘doesn’t suffer fools gladly’ and that he is always ‘the smartest man in the room’ wherever he goes.
This man knows the ancient sources of his discipline like the back of his hand and recognizes what book this is just by looking at the printed text on the first few pages. It is therefore written in the stars that on this day he doesn’t put down the book with the missing cover but opens it instead.
It’s an edition of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch. A printed book, one should hasten to add, not a handwritten manuscript. (Later it will turn out to have been printed in 1646.)
If you’ve ever set foot in a high school/grammar school or similar institution, I trust that you’ve learned that the European movable-type printing press (not the earlier East Asian one) was only invented about 200 years prior to this date, sometime around 1450, by Johannes Gutenberg – an invention that revolutionized the spread of information throughout Europe, spearheading the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Humanist Movement.
200 years later, in the mid-1600s, printing presses were already operating all over Europe, churning out books at an unprecedented rate. One of them was being operated by Isaac Voss (actually Isaac Vossius), a Dutch polymath and manuscript collector.
(And since I know that most of you originally came to this little blog here because you like the show ‘Young Royals’, let me just throw in a little fun fact for you, just a tiny chocolate truffle of info for you to enjoy: Isaac Voss, the Dutch polymath who printed the 1646 book we’re going to talk about in a minute, actually spent a few years in Sweden as the court librarian of…drum roll…Queen Kristina. Tada! Yes, that Queen Kristina. The one who almost certainly served as (at least) one source of inspiration for Queen Kristina on ‘Young Royals’. The real-life Swedish Queen who abdicated. That one! Isaac Voss left her employ upon her abdication, and since she was pretty much broke at that point, she paid him…in books. Now, it would have been too cool if the book that’s going to feature so heavily in our story today, the book that Isaac Voss printed, had been based on one of the handwritten manuscripts he got from Queen Kristina as payment, but unfortunately the book was printed in 1646, and that whole Swedish episode in Voss’s life happened only later, in the years 1648-54. But still…what a nice little coincidence, right?)
Let’s quickly return to 1958 and the man in the monastery library at Mar Saba, though:
If all the man had discovered there had been that book, which had been printed in 1646 by Isaac Voss in Amsterdam, then the life of the man in the library wouldn’t have changed quite so dramatically later on and we wouldn’t be discussing this story here today.
I mean, a 1646 book is a nice antiquarian find, but it’s not like that’s a sensation, right? There are quite a few books around from the 1600s.
But I already told you that, unlike what you and I would have done, the man in the library doesn’t just set the book without the cover aside; he flips it open instead.
It’s at that point that he makes the discovery! The discovery that will change everything.
You see, it’s not the printed 1646 book itself that’s the sensation here; it’s what somebody added to it by hand.
And that handwritten addition is quite a bit longer than your typical marginal note!
You know how books often have several blank pages in them (either as flyleaves or end pages)?
Well, this book, the book the man in the library is holding in his hand right now, has several blank pages at the back.
Formerly blank, I should probably say. Because somebody covered them in a small, fluid, barely legible, cursive Greek hand. There are three pages of this handwritten text in total.
Let’s take a quick break, you and I, dear reader, so we don’t get mixed up here:
The book itself is written (printed!) in Latin (with a few Greek passages thrown in here and there for good measure). The handwritten text on the three blank pages at the back, on the other hand, is written entirely in Greek.
The book was printed in 1646 in Amsterdam. Thus logic dictates that the handwritten text on the blank pages at the back of the book must be a later addition. (Makes sense, right? Logically, the handwritten text could only have been added at some point after 1646.)
The man in the library determines that this handwriting must be from the 18th century. (Later analyses will give different time estimates; some experts will say this type of cursive is typical for the late 17th century, others will suggest the early 19th century. But you know, ballpark.)
So, this handwritten text that was added by someone after 1646 is written in Greek, and it covers three pages at the back of the book. Crucially, the contents of the printed book and the handwritten text at the back don’t seem to be thematically connected in any way, shape or form. (More on this later.)
This is not unusual in and of itself.
Paper used to be a rare commodity. If some monk, say in the 18th century, came upon an (at this point already old) book with several precious blank (!) sheets of paper in it, he would have undoubtedly been overjoyed and gladly used the empty space, even if whatever he wished to write about wasn’t connected to the contents of the printed book at all.
What is very unusual, though, is the length of the text (three pages), the fact that this isn’t just some short end or marginal note.
From what the man in the library in 1958 can glean, it appears that the handwritten text isn’t an original piece by said hypothetical monk; it’s a copy!
(You know how copies were made before Xerox machines, right? Monks spent hours, days, weeks, months, years of their life laboriously copying texts by hand – word by word, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, one manuscript at a time…with a quill and some ink, sometimes using whatever scraps of paper they could find. They did it in the cold; they did it in the dark; they did it when their hands cramped up and their back was hurting from sitting on uncomfortable chairs in some draughty, unheated monastic scriptorium for hours; they did it by candlelight until their eyes burned with the strain…When you have dinner tonight and pour yourself a glass of wine, please raise it to the monks who devoted their lives to the copying of texts, so we can still enjoy them today – texts that would have otherwise been lost. And frankly, the monks’ cheeky complaints in (sometimes outright sacrilegious) marginalia often make the manuscripts so much more amusing.)
So, to the man in the library in 1958, it looks like some monk back in (presumably) the 18th century had access to an ancient, potentially deteriorating Greek manuscript (say, some papyrus or vellum scroll, for example). And because he felt that this scroll was falling apart and wouldn’t survive for much longer; he decided to preserve it for posterity and copied it, by hand, into a book that just happened to have a few blank pages in it.
I always think it’s easier to get a feel for these types of things when you have a concrete image of the book in question right in front of you. So, I searched around for quite a bit to see if I couldn’t find a digitized copy of this book online for you. And lo and behold, I got lucky. I found one!
The Austrian National Library in Vienna owns a copy of this 1646 book and, crucially, they have scanned and uploaded it in its entirety to their digital online catalogue. You can take a look at the scanned pictures for free, and you don’t even need to sign up with the library for this, which is really cool of them, I think.
This is the same printed 1646 book, but obviously not the same copy. (With a printed book, there are, of course, always several and sometimes even many books in circulation, depending on the edition.) So, there’s the Mar Saba copy from the monastery, and there’s this copy in Vienna. Both copies are identical – except that the Vienna copy has actually got a proper cover and a title page. And the end pages in the Vienna copy do look the way they’re supposed to, i.e. they are blank; unlike in the Mar Saba copy, there’s obviously no handwritten text at the back of the book.
Here’s the link to the Vienna copy: ‘Epistulae Genuinae S. Ignatii Martyris’ (1646).
I think it’s neat to actually get an idea of what this book looks like. You can almost feel what those old yellowed pages must feel like underneath your fingertips, can’t you?
If you click on page 330 in the navigation bar at the top, you get to the end of the book. (There’s the word ‘FINIS’ printed at the bottom in big, bold letters.)
Now, if you click through to the next couple of pages after that, you can see that they’re all blank.
This is where the Mar Saba copy has the mysterious handwritten text in Greek.
By the way, since we’re already talking about it, let me use this opportunity to tell you that the Austrian National Library, i.e. the former Imperial Court Library, in Vienna, is definitely worth a visit. I know most people go to Vienna in order to visit the house Mozart used to lived in or to spend a few hours at the Museum of Fine Arts or to listen to a concert at the Musikverein (or just to visit the showroom of the Bösendorfer grand pianos nearby; yeah, I’ve got my priorities straight, I know). But the Library is well worth a visit, too. (Here, take a look at the baroque State Hall of the library in all its splendour. Actually, this magnificent library and the tiny, dusty, cluttered tower library at Mar Saba monastery couldn’t be any more different. And yet they once both held copies of the same book.)
So, now you know what the 1646 book actually looks like, and you can probably picture the handwritten text on those blank pages at the back. (In fact, let me quickly throw you a link, so you can take a look at a photograph of one of the pages with the handwritten text on it.)
Let’s get back to 1958. (What, you’re dizzy already? There’s more time travelling to come, try to relax a bit, okay?)
Back in 1958, the man in his cell is holding this strange book in his hands now, squinting at the handwritten text. He can only decipher the first few lines, but he’s already picking up the scent of something sensational. (The even bigger bombshell hidden further down in the text isn’t something he’s noticed yet, but he’s only managed to decipher the first few sentences so far.)
His problem is that he hasn’t got enough time to properly study this strange handwritten text right now; today is one of his last days at the monastery. (Of course, it is! I mean, come on. A fictional story would be written in the exact same way: It would try to crank up the suspense by telling the viewer or reader that time is essentially running out for the main protagonist.)
So, it’s one of his last days. It’s difficult to make out what’s written on those three blank pages; he’d need a lot of time to read it all, and there’s still so much other stuff he’s got to do, so many books to catalogue, before he leaves the monastery.
And obviously, he’s not allowed to take that book with him. It belongs to the monastery. So, he has to act quickly.
Luckily the man has come here equipped with his camera, and by an incredible stroke of luck, he’s even got enough film left for a few pictures. (Remember that we’re not talking about our time here, where we’re all spoiled with smartphones that are able to take thousands upon thousands of digital photographs. These are the good old days of analogue photography and people having to be economical with the rare resource that is film).
The man takes three sets of black-and-white photographs of the three pages with the handwritten text on them, and you and I and anyone who likes good, suspenseful (and homoerotic) stories should say a prayer of thanks to whatever deity or deities they believe or don’t believe in that the pictures don’t come out blurry or overexposed or whatever.
A few days later, the man leaves the monastery with his camera in tow.
And it’s only once he’s back in Jerusalem, once he has that film developed and holds the black-and-white photographs in his hands, that he starts to fully grasp what a bombshell just got dropped in his lap…
