Archive for the ‘the Armenian National Education Committee (ANEC)’ Category

FALL OF ARDZEVASHEN

Posted in History, the Armenian National Education Committee (ANEC), tagged , , , , , on August 8, 2014|

THIS WEEK IN ARMENIAN HISTORY
(Prepared by the Armenian National Education Committee [ANEC])

Fall of Ardzevashen
 (August 8, 1992)

 

The Soviet policy of “divide and rule” created ethnic enclaves (piece of land surrounded by foreign territory) under various pretexts, such as the incorporation in Azerbaijan of the highlands of the historically Armenian region of Karapagh as an autonomous region (the lowlands were directly annexed to that country). It also created exclaves (piece of land politically attached to a larger piece, but surrounded by foreign territory), such as Ardzevashen, part of the Kegharkounik province of Armenia.

The village of Ardzevashen was founded in 1854 with the name of Bashkend by Armenians from Shamshadin, although an inscription on the St. Hovhannes church of the village, dated to 1607, attests to an earlier Armenian presence on the site.

The population of the village was entirely of Armenian origin. It had a surrounding territory of 40 square kilometers (15.5 square miles) and enjoyed a town status in the 1980s, managing four factories. This included a branch of Haykork, the Armenian state carpet company.

In May 1991, during the last months of the Soviet Union, when the conflict for Karapagh had already started, the inhabitants of the village surrendered their weapons to Soviet military units to avert an imminent occupation.

Indeed, Azerbaijan was prone to occupy those portions of Armenian territory that were completely landlocked, and one of them was Ardzevashen. After a four-day resistance headed by the unit 016 of motorized artillery of Vanatsor, Ardzevashen was surrendered to Azerbaijani armed forces on August 8, 1992. According to The New York Times, Azerbaijan announced the “liberation” of the town, destroying enemy tanks and weaponry, and killing 300 Armenian “brigands,” while Armenian reports did not mention any dead, but said that 29 people were “missing without trace.” The bodies of 12 Armenian soldiers were later delivered; one of the Azerbaijani colonels declared: “They fought until the last bullet. They are the pride of your nation.”

The Armenian population was given one hour to evacuate the village. According to the Regional Administration of Kegharkounik, 719 families (around 2,800 people) were displaced after its occupation. A total of 664 families resettled in the towns of Chambarak and nearby villages, and the rest went to other provinces. The migrants were not considered a separate commune, but the government of the Republic decided to create a separate working staff, financed by the national budget. This staff takes care of problems related to documents and workbooks of displaced people, as well as claims of property rights and improvement of living conditions.

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KILLING OF ENVER PASHA

Posted in History, the Armenian National Education Committee (ANEC), tagged , , , , , , on August 1, 2014|

THIS WEEK IN ARMENIAN HISTORY
(Prepared by the Armenian National Education Committee [ANEC])

 Killing of Enver Pasha
(August 4, 1922)

EnverPasha

Enver Pasha

The Russian revolution of November 1917 that set the grounds for the Soviet Union was followed by a civil war. Bolshevik troops were sent into Central Asia to establish Soviet power in 1919-1920. A local movement headed by Muslim elements, known as the Basmachi revolt (the Turkic word basmachi originally meant “bandit”), took advantage of the blunders of the Soviet government in Tashkent (the current capital of Uzbekistan) to challenge its authority and set a movement of national liberation.

Enver Pasha, former Ministry of War of the Ottoman Empire and one of the main perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide, had become a fugitive of justice after his condemnation to death in absentia by the Ottoman court-martial in July 1919. He had first left Constantinople for Berlin in late 1918 and in 1919 had gone to Moscow, where he engaged in pro-Turkish activities among the Bolsheviks. After participating in the Congress of Eastern Peoples of Baku (September 1920), he tried to reenter Anatolia in 1921, but was rejected by Mustafa Kemal.

HagopMelkoumian

Hakob Melkumian

Enver decided to return to Moscow and won over the trust of Soviet authorities. Lenin sent him to Bukhara, in Soviet Turkestan, to help suppress the Basmachi Revolt. He arrived on November 8, 1921. Instead of carrying his mission, he made secret contacts with some rebel leaders and defected along with a small number of followers. He aimed at uniting the numerous rebel groups under his own command and taking the offensive against the Bolsheviks. He managed to turn the disorganized rebel forces into a small well-drilled army and establish himself as its supreme commander. However, David Fromkin has written, “he was a vain, strutting man who loved uniforms, medals and titles. For use in stamping official documents, he ordered a golden seal that described him as ‘Commander-in-Chief of all the Armies of Islam, Son-in-Law of the Caliph and Representative of the Prophet.’ Soon he was calling himself Emir of Turkestan, a practice not conducive to good relations with the Emir whose cause he served. At some point in the first half of 1922, the Emir of Bukhara broke off relations with him, depriving him of troops and much-needed financial support. The Emir of Afghanistan also failed to march to his aid.”

Operation Nemesis had succeeded in the liquidation of several of Enver’s colleagues in European capitals. An Armenian group assassinated Ahmed Djemal Pasha on July 25, 1922, in Tiflis under the very sight of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. Ten days later, Enver would find his own Armenian nemesis in Central Asia.

Yakov Melkumov (Hakob Melkumian), born in Shushi (Gharabagh) in 1885, was a decorated career officer who had participated in World War I and after the revolution had entered the Red Army. After fighting in Bielorrusia (Belarus) in 1918, he became a cavalry brigade commander in Turkestan in late 1919, and from 1920-1923 he was involved in the suppression of the Basmachi revolt.

On August 4, 1922 Melkumian’s brigade launched a surprise attack while Enver had allowed his troops to celebrate the Kurban Bayrami holiday, retaining a 30-men guard at his headquarters near the village of Ab-i-Derya, near Dushanbe. Some Turkish sources claimed that Enver and his men charged the approaching troops, and the Turkish leader was killed by machine-gun fire. Melkumian published his memoirs in 1960, where he stated that Enver had managed to escape on horseback and hid for four days in the village of Chaghan. A Red Army officer infiltrated the village in disguise and located his hideout, after which the troops stormed Chaghan, and Melkumian himself killed Enver in the ensuing combat.

After seven decades in Ab-i-Derya, Enver’s remains were taken to Turkey in 1996 and buried at the Monument of Liberty cemetery in Istanbul. Melkumian was decorated with the second order of the Red Army for killing Enver and defeating his forces. The Armenian officer continued his military career until 1937 in Central Asia. He was arrested in June 1937, during the heyday of the Stalinist purges, and charged with participated in the “military-fascist conspiracy.” He was sentenced to 15 years in prison and 5 years of deprivation of civil rights. After the death of Stalin, he was freed in 1954 and rehabilitated. He died in Moscow in 1962.

 

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IVAN AIVAZOVSKY

Posted in History, the Armenian National Education Committee (ANEC), tagged on July 24, 2014|

THIS WEEK IN ARMENIAN HISTORY
(Prepared by the Armenian National Education Committee [ANEC])

 

Birth of Ivan Aivazovsky
(July 29, 1817)

Ivan Aivazovsky is considered one of the greatest marine painters in history. Famous Russian story writer Anton Chekhov popularized the winger word “worthy of Aivazovsky’s brush,” used for “describing something ineffably lovely.”

aivazovskySelfPortrait

Self Portrait, 1874

Aivazovsky was born Hovhannes Aivazian on July 29, 1817, in Feodosia, a port on the Black Sea in Crimea. He received parochial education at the local St. Sargis Armenian Church and was taught drawing by a local architect. He attended the Russian gymnasium of Simferopol from 1830-1833 and then studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts from 1833-1837, graduating with gold medal two years in advance.

The promising painter was sent by the Academy in 1840 to study in Europe. He first traveled to Venice, where his brother Gabriel was a member of the Mekhitarist Congregation (he would leave the congregation and return to the Armenian Apostolic Church in the 1850s). Aivazovsky studied Armenian manuscripts and became familiar with Armenian art. After a four year sojourn in Italy and France, with visits to half a dozen European countries and prolific exhibitions, he returned to Russia in 1844.

American Shipping off the Rock of Gibraltar1873

American Shipping off the Rock of Gibraltar, 1873

Upon his return, he was appointed academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts, from where he had graduated seven years before, and appointed the official artist of the Russian Navy. After traveling to the Aegean Sea and Constantinople in 1845, he settled in his hometown, Feodosia. The Academy gave him a title of professor of seascape painting in 1847, while the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences elected him a member in the same year.

He married English governess Julia Graves in 1848 and had four daughters. They separated in 1860 and divorced in 1877 with permission from the Armenian Church, since Graves was a Lutheran.

Aivazovsky would receive many honors throughout his life: first non-French artist to receive the Legion d’Honneur in France (1857), Order of the Medjidie (Ottoman Empire, 1857), honorary member of the Moscow Art Society (1857), Order of the Redeemer (Greece, 1859), Order of St. Vladimir (Russia, 1865), Order of Osmanieh (Ottoman Empire, 1874), member of the Academy of Arts of Florence (Italy, 1876), honorary member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Stuttgart (Germany, 1878), and others. He held fifty-five solo exhibitions over the course of his career in the Russian Empire, Europe, and the United States (New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, 1893), and participated in many collective exhibitions. He was one of the most prolific artists of his time: he created around 6,000 paintings during his almost sixty-year career. The vast majority of his works are seascapes, but he often depicted battle scenes, Armenian themes, and portraiture. He never painted his pictures from nature, but from memory. His artistic memory was legendary, The Ninth Wave (1850, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg) is generally considered his masterpiece.

Aivazovsky visited Russian Armenia for the first time in 1868. The next year, he participated in the opening ceremony of the Suez Canal in Egypt, and became the first artist to paint the Canal. He continued his travels abroad during the next three decades, including a trip to the United States in 1892. In 1880, he opened an art gallery in his Feodosia house, which became the third museum in the Russian Empire, after the Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg and the Tretyakov Gallery of Moscow. Two years later, he remarried to a young Armenian widow, Anna Burnazian. He said that he “became closer to [his] nation” by marrying her. His career across the civil ranks of Russian government reached its highest position in 1896 when, at the age of 79, he was promoted to the rank of full privy councillor.

Aivazovsky was deeply affected by the Hamidian massacres of 1894 and 1896. He painted a number of works on the subject. More symbolically, he threw the medals given to him by the Ottoman Sultan into the sea and told the Turkish consul in Feodosia: “Tell your bloodthirsty master that I’ve thrown away all the medals given to me, here are their ribbons, send it to him and if he wants, he can throw them into the seas painted by me.” He spent his last years in his hometown, to which he contributed many efforts to its improvement.

Aivazovsky passed away on May 2, 1900, in Feodosia and was buried in the courtyard of the St. Sarkis Church. A quote in Classical Armenian from Movses Khorenatsi’s History of Armenia is engraved on his tombstone: “Born as a mortal, left an immortal memory of himself.

 

 

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ASSASSINATION OF DJEMAL PASHA

Posted in History, the Armenian National Education Committee (ANEC), tagged , , , , , on July 17, 2014|

THIS WEEK IN ARMENIAN HISTORY
(Prepared by the Armenian National Education Committee [ANEC])


Assassination of Djemal Pasha
(July 21, 1922)

JamalPasha

Djemal Pasha

The Nemesis Operation, approved by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation in its 9th World Assembly, held in Yerevan in September-October 1919, had a long list of Turkish leaders responsible for the Armenian Genocide among its targets.

One of them was Ahmed Jemal, minister of Marine of the Ottoman Empire and member of the leading triumvirate of the Committee of Union and Progress (Ittihad), together with Talaat, minister of Interior, and Enver, minister of War. Jemal had taken the command of the IV Ottoman Army, based in Syria, and had overseen the execution of the second phase of the genocide, when the survivors of the caravans of deportees were dispatched and killed in the  camps along the Euphrates River. He had also been in charge of the assimilation of Armenian orphans.

Some targets of the operation, such as Talaat and former grand vizier Said Halim, Behaeddin Shakir (leader of the Special Organization) and Jemal Azmi (the “monster of Trebizond”), had been liquidated in Berlin and Rome, under the supervision of the special body created by the A.R.F. (Enver would be killed by a Bolshevik Armenian in August 1922, in Central Asia.) Jemal Pasha was also in Berlin, but had been able to avoid the Armenian avengers.

On July 26, 1922, The New York Times published a dispatch of the Associated Press, with byline Tiflis:

“Djemal Pasha, former Minister of Marine in the Turkish Unionist Government, Chief of Staff of the Afghan Army, has been assassinated here. Two Armenians are charged with the crime.

“Djemal Pasha was accompanied by two aides, who were also shot dead. He was traveling to Kabul from Berlin, where he had made important purchases from [sic] the Afghan Army.”

The Central Committee of the A.R.F. in Georgia still operated, although clandestinely, after Georgia had become a Soviet republic in March 1921. It organized the killing, according to Simon Vratzian:

“At the initiative of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’s Central Committee of Georgia, on July 21, 1922, in Tiflis and in broad daylight, the last surviving member [of the Ittihad triumvirate] and friend and accomplice of the Bolsheviks, Jemal Pasha, was assassinated. The incident had a shocking effect on everyone. The Cheka made innumerable arrests but did not dare to violent measures for fear of retaliations. Dro got permission from Moscow and quickly left for Tiflis, where all the distinguished Dashnaktsakans had been arrested. Dro’s prestige in the eyes of both the Dashnaktsakan comrades and the Bolsheviks was so great that it was possible for him to get the members of the Central Committee and other prisoners out of jail with conditions acceptable to both parties.”

Little is known about the details of the operation. The name of Stepan Dzaghigian (who would later die in Siberia, exiled during the Stalinist purges) has been mentioned as one of the executors, helped by Petros Ter Poghosian and Ardashes Gevorgian. A fourth name, Zareh Melik-Shahnazarian, has also been mentioned as their collaborator in the last years, with the archives still waiting to yield their secrets.

 

 

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ARSHAG TCHOBANIAN

Posted in History, the Armenian National Education Committee (ANEC), tagged , , , on July 11, 2014|

THIS WEEK IN ARMENIAN HISTORY
(Prepared by the Armenian National Education Committee [ANEC])

 

Arshag Tchobanian
 (July 15, 1872)

An influential literary critic and political activist, Arshag Tchobanian would become a sought-after name in the first half of the twentieth century.

ArshagTchobanian

Arshag Tchobanian

He was born in Constantinople on July 15, 1872. He lost his mother when he was a year old. After graduating from the Makruhian School in his neighborhood of Beshigtash (1886), he entered the newly founded Getronagan (Central) School in 1886. He graduated in 1891, when he had already started his literary contributions to the most important newspapers of the time, Arevelk and Hairenik. He published his first two books in 1891 and 1892. He taught at his alma mater in 1892-1893 and, after a year sojourn in France, continued his teaching. In 1895 he published a literary monthly, Dzaghig, but, due to the political repression and the Hamidian massacres of 1895-1896, he decided to leave Constantinople for good. He settled in Paris, where he would live the rest of his life.

Tchobanian became the leading voice of the Armenians in France and a promoter of Armenian literature and the Armenian Cause in Europe, with many publications in various journals and newspapers, and a series of books in French, along with his own wide production in Armenian. Among his books in French, the most important would be the three-volume Roseraie de l’Arménie (Rose Garden of Armenia), dedicated to Armenian medieval poetry, a subject of which he was a respected translator and scholar.

Between 1898 and 1911, he published the literary journal Anahid, which would become an influential name in Armenian literature. He also wrote for many Armenian newspapers throughout the world.

Tchobanian adopted ideological positions closer to the Reorganized Hunchakian Party, created after the division of the Hunchakian Party in 1896. Later, he entered the ranks of the Liberal Party, created after 1908 in Europe by members of the Reorganized Hunchakian Party.

The Armenian writer was an activist of the Armenian Cause during World War I and denounced the genocidal policy of Turkey. He was the editor of the newspaper Veradznunt from 1917-1919 and became a member of the Armenian National Delegation led by Boghos Nubar in February 1919. He was sent to Lebanon and Cilicia in 1920 to negotiate with the French authorities, at a time when Cilicia was still under French mandate, before being abandoned to the forces of Mustafa Kemal.

In October 1921 Tchobanian entered the Democratic Liberal (Ramgavar Azadagan) Party, founded in Constantinople, and was elected first chairman of its Central Board. During the 1920s, along with the party, he adopted a position favorable to cooperation with Soviet Armenia to further its economic and social development, including the settlement of Armenian refugees and orphans. He visited year the United States from coast to coast in 1926-1927. In 1929 he relaunched Anahid, which would last until 1949, with a pause between 1940 and 1946 due to World War II.

Tchobanian would continue his literary and public activities until his death on June 8, 1954, killed by a car when crossing a street in Paris at the age of 82.

 

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MOUNTAINOUS KARAPAGH BECOMES PART OF SOVIET AZERBAIJAN

Posted in History, the Armenian National Education Committee (ANEC), tagged , , , on July 4, 2014|

THIS WEEK IN ARMENIAN HISTORY
(Prepared by the Armenian National Education Committee [ANEC])

 

Mountainous Gharapagh
Becomes Part of Soviet Azerbaijan
(July 5, 1921)

The establishment of the Soviet regime in the Southern Caucasus between April 1920 and April of 1921 included the solution of ethno-territorial conflicts such as that of Mountainous Gharapagh, which had been in dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan since 1918.

Soviet Russia had recognized the mountainous area of Gharapagh as a disputed zone and, in August 1920, after an agreement signed by Soviet Russian and the Republic of Armenia, Russian forces had been temporarily deployed in the region.

On November 30, 1920, one day after the Armenian Bolsheviks had proclaimed Armenia as a Soviet republic (the power was actually transferred on December 2), the Revolutionary Committee of Azerbaijan (the highest executive power of the country at the moment) recognized that Gharapagh, Zangezur, and Nakhichevan, territories formerly pretended by Azerbaijan, were indivisible part of Armenia. GharabaghMap

The National Council of Azerbaijan, on the basis of the agreement signed by Soviet Azerbaijan and Soviet Armenia, proclaimed Mountainous Gharapagh as indivisible part of Armenia by the declaration of June 12, 1921. On the basis of the November 30, 1920 declaration and the agreement signed by the Soviet governments of Azerbaijan and Armenia, Armenia also made a similar declaration.

The text of the decree approved by the government of Armenia was published in the Armenian and Azerbaijani press (Bakinski rabotchi, organ of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, June 22, 1921), thus confirming legally the union of Mountainous Gharapagh to Armenia. In the context of international law, this was the last legal act regarding Mountainous Gharapagh during the Communist regime.

The fact was totally overlooked by the Caucasian Bureau of the Communist Party of Russia, which invited to a plenary session on July 4, 1921 in Tbilisi, where the union of Mountainous Gharapagh to Soviet Armenia was confirmed as a fact. However, by suggestion of Moscow and the immediate intervention of Joseph Stalin, the decision of the previous day was revised in the wee hours of July 5 and a new resolution was imposed, which established that Mountainous Gharapagh would be part of Soviet Azerbaijan as an autonomous region. This resolution was an unprecedented legal act in the history of international law, when the party body of a third country (Russia), without any legal grounds or jurisdiction, decided the status of Mountainous Gharapagh after another decision had been agreed before.

The Soviet republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia were included in the process of the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in December 1922. Despite the resistance of the Armenian population, on a small fraction of the territory of Gharapagh, by decision of the Central Executive Revolutionary Committee of Soviet Azerbaijan, on July 7, 1923, the Autonomous Region (Oblast) of Mountainous (Nagorno) Gharapagh was formed as part of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan, without having any common borders with Armenia.

This would not solve, but just freeze the question of Gharapagh for the next six decades and half, until the popular explosion of 1988 and the beginning of the Gharapagh movement.

 

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GHAZAROS AGHAYAN

Posted in the Armenian National Education Committee (ANEC), tagged , , , , on June 21, 2014|

THIS WEEK IN ARMENIAN HISTORY
(Prepared by the Armenian National Education Committee[ANEC])

Death of Ghazaros Aghayan
(June 20, 1911)

Ghazaros Aghayan was one of the important names in the literary and education awakening of Eastern Armenians in the late nineteenth century.

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Ghazaros Aghayan

He was born on April 4, 1840, in the Armenian village of Bolnis-Khachen, currently in Georgia. After receiving elementary education in his birthplace, in 1853 he entered the Nersisian School of Tiflis, but left after a year. He would become an autodidact.

He worked as a typographer in Tiflis, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. In 1867 he returned to the Southern Caucasus, and became the manager of the printing house of Holy Etchmiadzin and the editor of the monthly Ararat of the Holy See (1869-1870). He later entered the educational field and taught in schools of Akhaltskha (Akhaltsikhe), Alexandropol (Gumri), Yerevan, and Shushi (1870-1882), and was also the diocesan director of the Armenian schools of Georgia.

He was a theoretician of education. The aim of his pedagogical system was to develop “strong, smart, and virtuous” citizens. He gave preeminence to learning the mother tongue and to moral and esthetic education. He was against corporal punishments and favored co-ed schools, as well as practical education and physical education. He wrote many works in the field, and his textbook “Study of the Mother Tongue” was particularly appreciated; its first volume, with 33 printings, was the most commonly used first-grade textbook in Armenian schools for four decades (1875-1916.

Aghayan, who wrote the first autobiographical novel in Armenian literature (“AGhazaros Aghayan and Hovhannes Toumanianrutin and Manuel,” 1867) was also a famed author of children’s poetry and tales; his tale “Anahit” (1881) is a classic of the genre. His fairy tale “Aregnazan” and his poem “Tork Angegh” are also well-known works.

He worked in the editorial boards of the monthly Portz and the children journal Aghbiur. In 1895 he was arrested with the charge of being a member of the Hunchakian Party; he was exiled first to Nakhichevan-on-the-Don, and then to Crimea (1898-1900). He remained under police surveillance until the end of his life. In the 1900s he was the elder member of the literary cenacle “Vernatun” (Attic), together with Hovhannes Tumanian, Avetik Isahakian, Levon Shant, and Derenik Demirjian. He passed away on June 20, 1911, in Tiflis.

Aghayan was the father-in-law of renowned painter Martiros Sarian (1880-1972) and maternal grandfather of composer Ghazaros

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VAHAN CARDASHIAN

Posted in the Armenian National Education Committee (ANEC), tagged on June 5, 2014|

THIS WEEK IN ARMENIAN HISTORY
(Prepared by the Armenian National Education Committee[ANEC])

 

Death of Vahan Cardashian
(June 9, 1934)

An American-educated lawyer, Vahan Cardashian became the pioneer of the Armenian Cause lobby in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Cardashian was born on December 1, 1883, in Caesarea (actual Kayseri). He lost his father at an early age, and, after elementary education at a local Armenian school, he attended the French lyceum and the Talas American College. In 1902 he immigrated to the United States and attended the law school at Yale University from 1904-1908. In 1907 he married Cornelia Alexander Holub, a women rights advocate. Meanwhile, he published several books, A Brief Commentary on the Eastern Question, The Ottoman Empire of the Twentieth Century, and Actual Life in Turkish Harem.VahanCardashian

After graduation he went into private practice. Cardashian took a job as adviser of the Ottoman embassy in Washington D.C. in 1911 and general counselor of the consulate in New York. He was designated head of the Ottoman Chamber of Commerce and, in 1915, high commissioner of the Ottoman exhibition at the Panama-Pacific Universal Exposition in San Francisco. At the Exposition, he learned that his mother and sister had perished in the Armenian Genocide. He did not abandon his post, but started a secret campaign of letter-writing to inform American officials of the ongoing annihilation. He had already warned Secretary of War Lindsay Garrison in July 1914:

"I have information, bearing on the program of the Turkish Government, to be put into operation in the event of Turkey’s being involved in the European War with reference to all the native and foreign Christians in Turkey . . . Unless some powerful restraining forces are brought into play from without, you can rest assured that the Turk, with the opportunity for untrammeled action, such as he now believes to enjoy, will perpetrate upon helpless humanity the most ghastly horrors of his entire loathsome career."

When the Ottoman embassy discovered Cardashian’s backdoor work, he was fired. In early 1916, he sued for divorce from his wife. At the end of the war, Cardashian relied on his diplomatic and high society contacts to spearhead a lobbying effort, to which he committed his own personal resources. To reach beyond the Armenian American community, he founded the American Committee for the Independence of Armenia (ACIA) in December 1918. He gathered there some of the most prominent names of the day in American politics: James W. Gerard, former ambassador to Germany, who was the driving force of the ACIA along with Cardashian and the chairman of its Executive Board; Charles Hughes, 1916 presidential candidate of the Republican party; William Jennings Bryan, former Secretary of State; senator Henry Cabot Lodge (Massachusetts); and many others.

Cardashian’s tireless efforts included tours, letter campaigns, a flood of editorials in various newspapers, memoranda to the highest rank of officials, and many books and pamphlets.  The ACIA advocated for American recognition of the Republic of Armenia and an American mandate. It had 23 branches in thirteen states.

In the end, the ACIA efforts were fruitless, as the isolationist majority in the Senate, ironically headed by Lodge himself, rejected the American mandate over Armenia in May 1920. A few months later, the independent republic collapsed, and the Armenian Cause took another direction. However, Cardashian did not calm down. In 1924 he created the American Committee Opposed to the Lausanne Treaty (ACOLT) and led a successful campaign to block the ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne by the U.S. Senate. The ratification was rejected by the Senate in January 1927, citing Turkish failure to execute the Arbitral Award of President Woodrow Wilson as the main cause.

Exhausted and penniless after a two-decade long crusade for Armenian rights, Vahan Cardashian passed away on June 9, 1934, at the age of fifty-one. He was buried in Cedar Grove cemetery in Long Island. The legacy of the lone crusader for the Armenian Cause is a remarkable example for future generations.

 

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VAZKEN SHOUSHANIAN

Posted in History, the Armenian National Education Committee (ANEC), tagged on May 29, 2014|

THIS WEEK IN ARMENIAN HISTORY

(Prepared by the Armenian National Education Committee[ANEC])

 

Death of Vazken Shoushanian
(June 2, 1941)

 

Vazken Shoushanian, a talented young writer of the “School of Paris,” was also one of the orphans of the Armenian Genocide.

He was born in Rodosto (nowadays Tekirdag), a city of Eastern Tracia, on February 9, 1902. His birth name was Onnig. He studied and graduated from the local elementary schools. In September 1915 the Shoushanian family was deported to Asia Minor, from where they continued on the exile routes. Onnig lost his father, mother, brother, and sister on the deportation routes between 1915 and 1917. Meanwhile, he had reached Aleppo in February 1916. The young orphan, deprived of any family support, managed to survive doing various menial work in Aleppo and elsewhere until the end of the war, when he went to Constantinople and then to Rodosto.Shooshanian

In 1919, Shoushanian entered the Agriculture School of Armash, and moved to the Republic of Armenia with the rest of his schoolmates in September 1920. Caught in the whirlwind of the end of the independence and the beginning of the Soviet regime, the students finally left the country and returned to Constantinople in May 1921.

In July 1922, Shoushanian came to the United States, but he was not admitted in Ellis Island due to trachoma and he had to return to Constantinople. Months later, he managed to travel to France. He became a factory worker, and in the meantime, he studied agronomy from 1923-1926 in Valabre, near Marseilles. Meanwhile, he had started to write poetry, prose, and essays in the Armenian press of the Diaspora under the name Vazken Shoushanian, including Hairenik daily and monthly, in Boston. He had also become a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and in his twenties he represented the party at the Socialist International. He would pursue studies of Social Sciences in Paris and graduate in 1930.

From 1931-1932 he was part of the literary group Menk, which published the homonymous journal and gathered, for a short while, the most promising names in Armenian literature in the Diaspora, such as Shahan Shahnour, Zareh Vorpouni, and others.

Shoushanian was already a noted writer when in 1932-1933 he became entangled in the internal struggles of the A.R.F. and was left outside the party. However, as he wrote in a journal entry of 1939, he considered himself a member, “whether I have a party card or not.”

In the last years of his life, Shoushanian remained on the margin of Armenian life. He worked at a French boarding school in Rouen from 1933-1939. The school was closed due to the war in 1940 and Shoushanian made a dangerous trip to bring the students to their homes. After a seven-year absence, he then returned to Paris.

He caught pneumonia in the spring of 1941 and died practically alone, forgotten by almost everyone, in a Paris hospital. He did not have a tomb and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Few of his books were published in his lifetime; some remained scattered in the press, while others were left unpublished. His archives, in the end, went to Armenia, and some of his work started to be published in the 1950s, with publication still continuing until this day. A famous passage in his Journal was a testimony of his love for the Armenian language: “Armenian language, how much I love you! No girl on earth can brag that has received so much warm affection, so much love, so much entreaties from me. The fidelity that I feel towards you is more powerful than this miserable life of ours. I would like to study you until my last moment, your ultimate accents and your ultimate words, your internal music and the road you have traced in history. You are our prayer and our pleasure, Armenian language, I love you.”

 

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TEOTIG

Posted in History, the Armenian National Education Committee (ANEC), tagged , , , , , , on May 22, 2014|

 

THIS WEEK IN ARMENIAN HISTORY

(Prepared by the Armenian National Education Committee[ANEC])

 

Death of Teotig
 (May 24, 1928)

Almanacs were very fashionable in the Western world at the beginning of the twentieth century, when a real fever of publication started in the Armenian realm. Almanacs (daretsuyts) of very different size, quality, and duration—sometimes confused with yearbooks (darekirk)—would be published until the 1970s. In the history of Armenian almanacs, Teotig and his almanac would become synonyms and models.

Teotoros Lapjinjian was born in 1873 in Scutari (Üsküdar), a suburb of Constantinople on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus, in a modest family that migrated from Erzinga. He would later adopt his childhood nickname Teotig as a literary pseudonym.

After primary studies at the local school, he first attended the Berberian College, but could not graduate due to financial problems. For a while, he attended the American-financed Robert College (now Bogazici University), which he could not finish either. In 1889, at the age of 16 he went to work as a bookkeeper in a store.

However, his avid interest in books and reading led him to self-teaching. He was just past his teens when he started to contribute literary pieces and essays to various newspapers. Meanwhile, he became a “bibliomaniac,” as he called himself: “I have not eaten, drunk, or bought clothes, and have allocated all my earnings to books,” he confessed once.Teotig

In 1902 he married Arshaguhi Jizvejian (1875-1922), a young woman educated in Paris and London. Three years later, he won the prestigious Izmirlian Literary Prize for a voluminous work on the Armenian dialect of Constantinople, which remained unpublished until the present.

1907 would become a crucial date in Teotig’s life. With the crucial assistance of his wife, he started the publication of his lifelong project, Amenun daretsutyse (Ամէնուն տարեցոյցը “Everyone’s Almanac”). For the next twenty-two years, the nineteen volumes, with a total of 8,500 pages, would offer the reader the most complete information about every aspect of Armenian life. The most important writers of the time would contribute literary pieces and articles on the most various topics. The almanac became a sort of illustrated encyclopedia of Armenian life during the first quarter of the twentieth century, with much information and photographs of unique nature in its pages.

In 1912 Teotig produced a book called Dib oo Dar (Typeface and Letter), on the 1500th anniversary of the creation of the Armenian alphabet (which at the time was commemorated in 1913) and the 400th anniversary of Armenian printing. In the same year, he published a collection of short stories, The New Year.

Teotig became one of the targets of the Turkish secret police at the beginning of World War I. In March 1915, right after the publication of the 1915 issue of the almanac, he was arrested and on the grounds of trumped-up charges, a war tribunal sentenced him to one year in the central prison of Constantinople. In March 1916, just out of prison, he was arrested in the street and sent to Anatolia with a caravan of deportees. He reached Bozanti, in Cilicia, where a group of Armenian young people was able to rescue him and hide him in a workplace of the Constantinople-Baghdad railway. He remained there, with a false identity, until the armistice of Mudros in November 1918, when he returned to Constantinople.

He resumed the publication of his beloved almanac. In the meantime, in 1919 he published Memorial to April 11 (April 24 in the old Ottoman calendar), on the first commemoration of the arrests of April 24, with 761 biographies of intellectuals. He also published a booklet, The Catastrophe and Our Orphans, in 1920, and wrote a lengthy study on the Armenian clergy victims of the genocide, commissioned by the Armenian Patriarchate, which was posthumously published in 1985.

His wife Arshaguhi, a writer and educator, died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Switzerland in 1922, and Teotig was left with their only son, Vahakn. In the same year, the triumph of Kemalism in Turkey prompted him to leave his birthplace and become an exile. He would live in precarious conditions in Corfu, Cyprus, and finally Paris, continuing the publication of his almanac in Vienna, Venice, and Paris. He passed away in Paris on May 24, 1928, when the publication of the 1929 issue was halfway. His son had come to the United States, where he would die in the 1960s.

In 2006, the Cilicia Publishing House of Aleppo, with the sponsorship of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, started to reprint Teotig’s almanac in a photographic edition introduced and indexed by Aleppine intellectual Levon Sharoyan. Unfortunately, only 13 volumes had been published until 2011, when the catastrophic Syrian civil war disrupted the project, as well as the entire life of the Syrian Armenian community.

 

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