Sometime between 1923 and 1930 the palimpsest was acquired by Marie Louis Sirieix, a "businessman and traveler to the Orient who lived in Paris." Though Sirieix claimed to have bought the manuscript from a monk, who would not in any case have had the authority to sell it, Sirieix had no receipt or documentation for a sale of the valuable manuscript. Stored secretly for years by Sirieix in his cellar, the palimpsest suffered damage from water and mold. In addition, after disappearing from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate's library, a forger added copies of medieval evangelical portraits in gold leaf onto four pages in the book in order to increase its sales value, further damaging the text. These forged gold leaf portraits nearly obliterated the text underneath them, and x-ray fluorescence imaging at Stanford would later be required to reveal it.