Zardagir: Armenia's decorated letters

The tradition

Letters that are also pictures

Open an old Armenian gospel book and the first letter of a chapter is rarely just a letter. It is a stork bending its neck into the curve of a Ս, a vine winding itself into an Ե, two fish meeting to close a loop. Armenian illuminators have been decorating initial letters this way since around the 10th century, and the practice has a name: zardagir (զարդագիր), the decorated letter.

The letter stays legible. That is the quiet rule of the whole tradition. However many birds and blossoms a scribe worked into a glyph, a reader still saw the letter first, the garden second.

The four families

Birds, beasts, people, ornament

Scribes worked in a few recognizable styles, each named for what the letter is built from:

• Trchnagir · թռչնագիր — bird letters, the most famous of the family. Storks, peacocks and songbirds (sometimes fish) intertwine with ornament until their bodies become the strokes of the letter itself.
• Kendanatar · կենդանատառ — animal letters, also called gazanatar (գազանատառ), beast letters: lions, deer and imagined creatures bent into letterforms.
• Mardatar · մարդատառ — human-figure letters, where a person's posture draws the glyph.
• Zardatar · զարդատառ — pure ornament: vine, knot and flower, with no creature in sight.

The manuscripts

Where to see the real thing

The reference collection is the Matenadaran, the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts in Yerevan, which keeps one of the world's great collections of Armenian manuscripts. Many of the source books are around a thousand years old, which means the letterforms themselves have long since passed into the public domain. They belong to everyone, which is rather the point of handing them to a child with a crayon.

In the app

How Nuṛ draws on zardagir

Nuṛ's Armenian alphabet pages inherit this decoration language rather than inventing a new one. Each page is the letterform itself, carrying its design inside the stroke: a bird, a few leaves, a handful of ornament cells.

A manuscript initial is dense in a way a small fingertip cannot use, so the adaptation is deliberate. A page keeps a handful of big, closed regions instead of a full interlace, every region is large enough to tap, and the decoration never eats the glyph. A child coloring Ա should still see Ա.

More on the alphabet pages themselves: Coloring the Armenian alphabet.