The authoritative textus receptus of the Qur?an is known to have been prepared at the command of the third Caliph ?Uthman b. ?Affan, around 650 CE. Most early Muslim authorities agree that ?Uthman prepared between four and nine copies, kept one in Medina, and dispatched the rest to the Muslim garrison towns (al-amsar), to serve as master copies of the sacred text. Albeit, as I will show, only some aspects of the format of ancient codices were considered by later copyists as obliging features of the mushaf. At some point, Qur?ans known as masahif al-amsar were accorded special sanctity and treated as precious potent relics. In the twelfth century, several codices were known as "Mushaf ?Uthman," i.e. the codex that the caliph had read in Medina at the time of his assassination (656), and stained with his blood. Private and public rituals in honor of those Qur?ans developed in the great mosques of Damascus, Cordova, Marrakesh and Cairo, and in shrines as distant as Tashkent and mountainous Uzbekistan. I will linger on some of these rites, showing that the codices were treated as talismanic repositories of baraka (blessing), not only as holy texts. In the 19th and 20th centuries, some of those ancient Qur?ans, or folios taken out of them, were appropriated from their previous settings, and displayed as artifacts in the museums of Istanbul, Cairo and St. Petersburg. My talk will uncover the vicissitudes of a couple of ?Uthmani Qur?ans, and analyze the transitions in their purpose in changing historical contexts. I will show how the social and bodily practices of engaging with the object, the arrangements of its display, and the discourse by which it was addressed, changed along with its changing perception. As I intend to show, however - focusing on the discourses of the recent catalogues of the "Pavilion of Sacred Relics" of the Topkapi Museum and the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul – the same object may be a textus receptus, a relic and a cultural artifact at one and the same time, depending on the eye of the beholder.