The St. Karapet Armenian monastery was burned and robbed during the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and later abandoned.
Its stones have since been reappropriated by local Kurds for building purposes, only its door was miraculously rescued.
The doors were obtained by an Istanbul-based German artist Richter in 1976 who acquired them for 5,000 Deutsche Marks and secretly kept them in his house.
He was a friend of the Armenian architecture historian Armen Hakhnazarian. Then, after his death, it was auctioned in London in 1996 and sold for $50,000.
The organizers of the “MetArmenia” exhibition were able to contact the owner of the historic door of St. Karapet and the monumental carved wooden doors were displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018.
This unique relic of Western Armenia has become available to the general public for the first time since 1915.
Wooden carved doors of St. Karapet Armenian Church of Mush are currently housed in a closed private collection in Canada.
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