Shavarsh
Missakian was a veteran journalist and political activist who played an
important role both in the history of the Armenian press and the
organization of the Diaspora.
He
was born in August 1884, on the feast of the Assumption of the Holy
Virgin, in the village of Zimara, near Sepastia (Sivas). He moved to
Constantinople in 1890 with his family, where he studied at the
Getronagan School, and became a journalist at the age of sixteen.
He started his career in the daily Surhantag (1899-1908). During
the early 1900s, in the last year of the tyrannical regime of Abdul
Hamid II, he published and distributed revolutionary literature, and
contributed to the journals Droshak (in Geneva) and Razmig (in
Plovdiv, Bulgaria) of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, which he
joined in 1907. After the restoration of the Ottoman Constitution in
1908, he published the literary weekly Aztag, with
Zabel Essayan, Kegham Parseghian, and Vahram Tatoul from 1908-1909. He
also founded a bookstore called Ardziv, which doubled as a publishing
house.
In 1911-1912 Missakian settled in Garin (Erzerum) as the editor of the A.R.F. newspaper Haratch. Afterwards, he returned to Constantinople and became a member of the editorial board of the A.R.F. daily Azatamart.
He
initially escaped the arrest of Armenian intellectuals on the fateful
night of April 24, 1915. He lived clandestinely until March 1916,
heading a group of A.R.F. militants who had also escaped the arrests. He
provided valuable information and articles to the journal Hayastan of
Sofia (Bulgaria), published during 1915, about the ongoing Turkish
repression and deportations. The Ottoman authorities could not locate
him, and decided to deport his father to Konia, but the latter managed
to escape. Shavarsh Missakian was denounced by a Bulgarian spy and
arrested on March 26, 1916, when he tried to go to Bulgaria. He was
imprisoned and tortured; he tried to escape by throwing himself from the
third floor of the prison, but he broke his leg and was captured. He
was condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to five years of
prison. In the end, he was freed after the armistice of Mudros on
October 30, 1918.
He soon became the editor-in-chief of the daily Djagadamart, which replaced Azatamart, closed
on April 24, 1915. In 1919 he traveled to Armenia, where he
participated in the ninth General Assembly of the A.R.F. in Yerevan.
The
impending advance of the Kemalist forces over Constantinople compelled
many Armenians, including Missakian, to take the route of exile. In
November 1922 he left the Ottoman capital and moved to Sofia, where he
married Dirouhi Azarian (1891-1964), whom he had known when she worked
as the bookkeeper for Djagadamart. In
November 1924 he was sent to Paris, where he participated in the tenth
General Assembly of the A.R.F. (November 1924-January 1925) and was
elected a member of the party Bureau, a position that he held until
1933.
In August 1925 he launched the daily Haratch as
a personal undertaking. The daily soon became the main voice of the
Armenian community of France, with a circulation of 5,000 copies and the
sought-after articles of its publisher and editor. Haratch became
also a gathering place for the young generation of Armenian writers in
the 1920s and 1930s that would be known as the “Paris boys.” It appeared
without interruption until the Nazi occupation of Paris, when Missakian
decided to voluntarily close the newspaper in June 1940.
Haratch was reopened in April 1945, after the Liberation. Eight months later, in an editorial of December 1945, Missakian coined tseghasbanutiun, the
Armenian word for an almost unknown term, “genocide.” He would be one
of its frequent users in the press. In the same year, the editor of Haratch would
undertake the organization of the new generation with the foundation of
the A.R.F.-affiliated “Nor Seround” (equivalent to the Armenian Youth
Federation in North America) and its journal Haiastan, which continues its publication.
Shavarsh Missakian directed Haratch until
the last day. He passed away on January 26, 1957, and was buried in the
cemetery of Père-Lachaise. His daughter Arpik Missakian would succeed
him in the direction of the journal, which she would publish for
fifty-two more years, until May 2009, continuing her father’s
traditions.
Missakian’s short memoir of his survival in the Ottoman prison, Leaves from a Yellowish Journal, was published in 1957, and a collection of his articles scattered in the Armenian press, entitled Days and Hours, in
1958. His memoir was translated into French by his daughter and
published in 2015. A square named after him was inaugurated in the ninth
arrondisement of Paris in 2007.
