---
title: "Zardagir: Armenia's decorated letters — Nuṛ — Artifex Innovations"
description: "For a thousand years Armenian scribes have built letters out of birds, beasts, people and vines. What zardagir is, where to see it, and how Nur turns it into coloring pages."
canonical: "https://www.artio.space/nur-decorated-letters"
---

# Zardagir: Armenia's decorated letters — Nuṛ — Artifex Innovations

Zardagir: Armenia's decorated letters — Nuṛ — Artifex Innovations

- [Skip to content](https://www.artio.space/nur-decorated-letters#nur-main)

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](https://www.artio.space/nur-alphabet-coloring).

In the app, your first Armenian letters are free. The whole alphabet opens with
Nuṛ Plus, $5.99 a month or $35.99 a year, with Apple Family Sharing and no free
trial. Nuṛ is coming soon to the App Store for iPhone and iPad; write to
[info@artio.space](mailto:info@artio.space)
for a note when it ships.