Birth of Yervant Odian (September 19, 1869)

A century and a half ago, “the greatest Armenian satirist born for laughter” after Hagop Baronian, in the words of novelist Shirvanzade, was born in Constantinople. Yervant Odian would surpass Baronian, the premier name in Armenian satirical literature, by the sheer number and variety of his works. His ability to write stories at any given instant was unique. Many of Odian’s works were published in daily installments, following the French model of the feuilleton, and some of them remained unpublished as books for long decades.

Born on September 19, 1869, Օdian grew up at the home of his uncle, the statesman and political figure Krikor Odian, where he witnessed the debates of famous literary names. He attended the Berberian Lyceum from 1882-1883, but he dropped out due to his weakness and completed his education with private tutors and insatiable reading in Armenian and French.

He started his literary career in 1887 with translations and literary studies. Five years later, he became assistant editor of the famous daily Hairenik of the Ottoman capital. He was producing a steady flow of chronicles, short stories, and novellas, drawing upon social and political issues. In 1896 Odian became editor of Hairenik, but in the same year, the persecutions and massacres started in Constantinople prompted him to leave the Ottoman Empire. For the next twelve years he would live as an exile in Greece, Paris, England, Austria, Egypt, and India, which he later portrayed in a memoir entitled Twelve Years Out of Constantinople (1912-1913). He published several newspapers in Greece, Paris, and Egypt, and wrote many works, including a series of stories under the title of The Parasites of the Revolution (1899).

After the Ottoman Revolution, Odian returned to Constantinople in 1909. He continued writing and publishing several satirical newspapers. In the period 1909-1915 he wrote several of his masterpieces of political and social satire: the first two parts of his novel The Comrade Panchooni (1910 and 1914), Family, Honor, Moral (1910), The Letters of a Trader (1914), The Wife of the Councilman (1915), two detective novels about the tyrannical rule of Abdul Hamid, Abdul Hamid and Sherlock Holmes (1911) and Saliha Hanum or the Army against the Tyrant (1912), his satirical profiles of Armenian political representatives ( Our Deputies, 1913). He also translated from French into Armenian Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1910) and Anna Karenina (1911), as well as works by Emile Zola, Feodor Dostoyevsky, Maxim Gorky, Mark Twain, and others. He also wrote a series of profiles of Armenian politicians, called Our Deputies (1913).

Odian avoided the roundup of April 24, 1915, but was arrested in August 1915 and deported. However, he survived three years and a half of a deportee life, and he depicted his recollections in the memoir Accursed Years (1918-1919). He returned to Constantinople after the armistice of October 1918 and resumed his literary activities, again contributing to newspapers (he contributed daily columns to various newspapers simultaneously) while editing some newspapers of his own and writing more novels, such as the three-volume The Spy Number 17 (1919-1921) and several others.

Like many other intellectuals, Odian abandoned Constantinople in 1922 after the triumph of the Kemalist movement and moved to Bucharest (Romania). Two years later, he moved to Tripoli (Lebanon), and then to Cairo (Egypt). He passed away օ n October 3, 1926, and was buried at the cemetery of Mar Mina.

The works of Yervant Odian have been translated into many languages (Turkish, French, Bulgarian, Greek, Spanish, and others). Both Comrade Panchooni and Accursed Years have been translated into English.

In 1964 Odian’s story “The False Spy,” directed by Henrik Malian, became one of the episodes of the film Monsieur Jacques and the Others, produced by Armenfilm. Almost three decades later, in 1992, Arman Manarian directed a cinematographic version of Comrade Panchoon that was also released by Armenfilm in Armenia. A street of Yerevan and a school in Vagharshapat have been named after Yervant Odian.

Death of Alexander Saroukhan (January 1, 1977)

Alexander Saroukhan (Saroukhanian) was among the most famous caricaturists and cartoonists of the Diaspora outside the Armenian realm, as he became a much-sought name in the Arab world.

Saroukhan was born in Ardanush, a town in the province of Batum (now Georgia) on October 1, 1898. At the age of two, his family moved to Batum, where he went to the Russian school at the age of seven. In 1909 the Saroukhan family moved to Constantinople, where Alexander and his brother Levon attended the school of the Viennese branch of the Mekhitarist Congregation. From 1910-1912 the Saroukhan brothers published a handwritten, four-page weekly called Ghughigo, with Levon as the writer and editor and Alexander as the caricaturist. Their publication was interrupted when their father decided to return to Batum after his commercial plans ended in failure, and they remained in Constantinople to continue their studies. The brothers would burn the copies of the weekly, for obvious reasons of safety, during the Armenian Genocide.

Saroukhan graduated in 1915 and found refuge in the school, which was under Austrian protection, during the war, together with their teachers and a group of students. After the armistice of Mudros (1918), he worked in the British army as a translator from Russian, Turkish, and German, and also as a scribe in a store. He started publishing caricatures in Armenian newspapers and magazines, particularly the satirical magazine Gavrosh (1921-1922). In 1922 he left Turkey and went to Europe to study at the section of graphics of the Art Academy of Vienna, finishing his studies in two years, instead of the usual four.

In 1924 Saroukhan left for Egypt with more than 125 pieces of his art work. He published the satiric magazine Armenian Cinema (1925-1926), where he also featured his drawings. He presented some of his works at an exhibition in Cairo (1927) and met Egyptian journalist Mohamed El-Tabii. They cooperated closely, becoming the most important and influential journalists in Egypt for twenty years. Saroukhan worked as a caricaturist for the widely circulated Rose el-Yusuf magazine, named after its founder, which El-Tabii edited. His drawing of Rose (aka Fatima) el-Yusuf, a Syrian woman journalist, was the first to appear on the cover of the magazine in March 1928. From then on, Saroukhan became known as a “political” caricaturist. He would draw the cover of the magazine until 1934.

His fame was also established through his character El-Masri Efendi (Egyptian Efendi in Arabic). However, because of a dispute between Rose el-Yusuf and Mohamad el-Tabii, Saroukhan left the magazine and joined the staff of Akher Sa’a (Last Hour), another Egyptian well-known paper, which el-Tabii published until 1946. In 1945 he published Cette guerre (This War in French, 1945), considered to be his finest book as it defined his talents to discover humor in criticism.

When El-Tabii sold Akher Sa’a to Akhbar El-Yom (Today’s News), Saroukhan moved to the new newspaper, where he worked until 1952, and then he went to work at the newspaper Akhbar (Today) until his death. He published a French-language humor magazine, La Caravane, from 1939-1942. He also contributed to Egypt's foreign language press, with cartoons in La Presse Egyptienne, Image, and the Armenian daily Arev. He had exhibitions in Yerevan (1968) and Montreal (1973), among other places.

Saroukhan drew more than 40,000 political, social, and humoristic caricatures. He was also active in the Armenian community life of Cairo. He published various collections of caricatures in Armenian, like We Through Our Lenses (1962) and Look at What You’re Saying! (1962), as well as the play We Don’t Know Armenian (1963). Among other publications, he also contributed his drawings to the republication of two classics of Armenian satirical literature: Yervant Odian’s Comrade Panchoonie (1938) and Hagop Baronian’s The Honorable Beggars (1962). His drawings were also used in the English translations of these books by Jack Antreassian, and in the Spanish translation of Comrade Panchoonie by Vartan Matiossian.

Saroukhan passed away in Cairo on January 1, 1977. He has had posthumous exhibitions of his drawings in Alexandria (2009), Athens (2017), Cairo (2018), and Liverpool (2018), and his memoirs were published in 2018 in Cairo.