In 1844 Constantin von Tischendorf, a young German scholar hunting biblical manuscripts, was at the monastery of St Catherine on Sinai and saw leaves of an ancient Greek Bible. He left with forty-three of them, which went to Leipzig. He came back in 1853 and found nothing, and again in 1859 under Russian patronage, and on that visit obtained the bulk of the manuscript, which travelled to St Petersburg and to Tsar Alexander II as protector of the Orthodox Church.
What kind of transaction that was has never been agreed. Tischendorf described a gift to the Tsar. The monastery holds that the leaves were handed over on loan, for copying, against a receipt that promised their return, and that they were not returned. Both parties can point at documents, and the documents can be read both ways. The dispute is not a curiosity: it is the reason the oldest complete New Testament in existence is not in one place.
The Russian holding was sold by the Soviet government to the British Museum in 1933 for a hundred thousand pounds, half of it raised by public subscription in Britain during a depression. Further leaves turned up at St Catherine's in 1975, walled into a room. Today the manuscript sits in London, Leipzig, Sinai and St Petersburg, and the only place it exists whole is on a screen, in the digital reunion completed in 2009.