“Out of all misfortunes destroying and distorting a person’s soul, illiteracy, ignorance and narrow-mindedness are the worst.”These are the words of the prominent Georgian theologian and philosopher, Metropolitan Anthim Iverianul(1650-1716). He spent most of his life in Romania, and was officially canonized by the Romanian and Georgian churches. Anthim Iverianul’s legacy has not been translated into Georgian – most of his writings were originally in Romanian, while his correspondence in Greek and Arabic are currently found in different libraries worldwide. This is why Georgian academic circles have not been properly introduced to his works except for some parts of his complex scholarly studies that were translated from Romanian into brief English resumes.

Nanoscience and its component, bionanoscience, are modern interdisciplinary research “super-domains”, compulsory conceptual platforms for the development of the related domains of nanotechnology and bionanotechnology. These fields began to emerge in the 1960s, however they developed as essential constituents of well-funded strategic policies only at the beginning of the 21st c, and especially in highly developed and/or rapidly developing countries such as the USA, EU, Japan, Israel, China and India. The prefix “nano” and the abbreviation “nm” are the shortened variants of the term “nanometer”, indicating one-billionth part of a meter (10^–9m). At the beginning of the development of these disciplines the terms “nanoscopic matter” or “mesoscopic matter” were used for categories of matter with dimensions of 100 nm or less. Subsequently, however, it was discovered that the borderline between “nano” and “normal” matter could be calculated much lower at around 10, or even 1 nm!

A palimpsest is a manuscript page from which the text has been scraped or washed off and which can be used again. The first layer of the parchment as well as the second one are lisible, making it possible to access older sources of biblical texts. Georgian palimpsests are preserved in museums in Georgia and abroad, including European university libraries.

All countries have symbols – identification marks for itself and for others, to define itself and to define others. Symbols have one of two fates: either we get so accustomed to them that we fail to notice them, or else we do not know them at all because we do not need them anymore. The Gelati Academy is a key symbol of the founding of the successful Georgian state—and yet the 900th anniversary of its foundation is going unnoticed by the public, while the Gelati Bible with Catenas (a biblical text within which each section contains commentaries of various kinds and authors), remains a symbol of Georgian spirituality, intellect, education and literature has been known only to specialists.