The book under review is the result of four years of hard work. According to Armen Khechojan, General Director of the Foundation for the Development and Support of Armenian Studies “ANIV,” “this book is not only a profound scientific study at the intersection of many disciplines, but also an important international project, because the product created by an Armenian master is today the cultural heritage of both the countries that were part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the whole world” (6).

Madzharskije (The Madzharskys) is devoted to Slutsk belts. The production of the belts continued for more than half of the eighteenth century, and they became an absolute legend. The introduction (10–34) discusses the historiography of the Slutsk belts: for the first time, it is presented and analyzed in a consistent manner. Most of the book is the story of a family of Armenian weavers, creators of the famous Slutsk belts, father and son Jan and Leon Madzharsky, who worked in Slutsk and Niasvizh, on the territory of modern Belarus.

In the first chapter, the section 1.5, “Have the Armenian Madzharskys preserved their Native Language?” deals with the ethnic identity of the Madzharskys. Through meticulous analysis of the documents, the authors have reconstructed the history of the Madzharsky family. They provide convincing evidence that “both Jan and Leon Madzharsky undoubtedly retained their Armenian identity. Besides, Leon Madzharsky certainly felt himself to be a representative of the local gentry community” (112).

Together with the story of the famous father and son, the book contains interesting linguistic information. The Madzharskys wrote in Armenian using the Armenian alphabet and in Polish using the Latin alphabet. The authors characterize the language of the Madzharskys’ Armenian notes: “Polish vocabulary with a small admixture of Belarusian words constitutes 81.7 per cent of the language of these notes in the Armenian alphabet” (102).

The language of father and son Madzharsky is a good example of the idiolect of the Armenians on the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The formation of this idiolect involved Armenian, Polish, Old Belarusian (prosta mova), elements of Church Slavonic, Old Russian, Latin, Turkish, and other languages. The authors write: “The Armenian notes of the father and son Madzharsky show similarities with such phenomena as ‘kitabs’—17th–19th century texts written by Tatars of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in Old Belarusian and Polish, using Arabic letters” (271). This is another example of the multi-ethnicity of the GDL, where different peoples wrote in Slavic languages (Old Belarusian, Polish, Church Slavonic) with different alphabets (Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Latin).

A third of the book is made up of highly-professional appendixes: 1. “Generational inventory of the Madzharsky family’s ʽDar’ Coat of Arms” (274–76); 2. “Itineraries of the ʽBelarusian’ Period of Jan and Leon Madzharsky” (277–81); 3. “Documents on the Life and Work of Family Representatives” (282–325); 4. “Letters of Jan and Leon Madzharsky” (326–47); 5. “Extracts from the Metric Books of the Roman Catholic Churches on Births, Marriages and Deaths of Family Members, as Well as Records in which they are Mentioned as Witnesses” (348–431); 6. “Dictionary of the Written Language of Jan and Leon Madzharsky” (432–35); 7. “Autographs of Jan Madzharsky in Armenian” (436–38); 8. “Autographs of Leon Madzharsky in Armenian” (439), as well as an Index of Names (460–77) and Geographical Index.

This book covers the history of contacts between several Slavic countries and Armenia. For a scholar or just a curious person, it is full of discoveries. The F3 book format is beautifully published and richly illustrated with photographs, portraits, documents, and drawings. An electronic version of the book is available on the academia.edu portal on the site of Dzianis Liseichykau. The world community of Armenians, as well as Slavs, with whose ancestors they came into contact on the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, can be proud of this excellent publication.