Death of Kristapor Kara-Murza - March 27, 1902

This year is the 160th anniversary of the birth of composer Kristapor Kara-Murza, introducer of choral music in Armenian culture. He was born on March 2, 1853 (February 18, according to the old Julian calendar) in the town of Gharasu-Bazar, currently Bielogorsk, in the Crimea (Ukraine). He started to play piano and flute at age 8 and also took private lessons from music teachers in the town. He developed his abilities to read and write music. He was just a teenager when he started to organize and offer concerts. 

He moved to Tiflis, the capital of the viceroyalty of the Caucasus, in 1882, and then to Baku from 1885-1892. He was the editor of musical criticism for the daily Mshak, edited by Grigor Artzruni. Kara-Murza offered the first concert of choral music in Armenian history, with a program of patriotic songs, at the theater founded by Artzruni in Tiflis. This was a novelty, as Armenian music was fundamentally written on a one-voice basis, as opposed to European four voices (polyphony). During the next seventeen years, until his premature death at the age of 49, the composer organized some 90 choral groups in fifty cities of Armenia and outside the country, including Tiflis, Baku, Etchmiadzin, Nakhichevan-on-the-Don, Odessa, Batum, Moscow, Kars, Shushi, Constantinople, and others, and gave more than 250 concerts with the participation of 6,000 people.

Kara-Murza’s most important achievement was the collection of Armenian religious and popular songs, and their musical arrangement and conversion into polyphonic music. In 1887 he premiered his arrangement of the Divine Liturgy in a concert in Baku. He taught music at the Kevorkian Seminary of Holy Etchmiadzin in 1892-1893, and later settled back in Tiflis, where he gave special courses to musical conductors.

He also composed songs with lyrics by Armenian poets, as well as music a cappella, and also arranged operatic melodies. He presented in Baku fragments of Faust, the famous opera of French composer Charles Gounod (1818-1893), in Armenian translation. Kara-Murza arranged 300 choral and popular songs, among them such classics as “Dzidzernag,” “Zinch oo zinch,” “Kezi mernim,” “Khorodig,” “Lepho lele.”  He also composed and transcribed popular dances, and became the precursor to the modern song and dance ensembles.

In recent years, Kara-Murza has been credited with the composition of the music of the song “Mer Hairenik,” with lyrics by Mikael Nalbandian (1829-1866), which he premiered in Tiflis, in 1885. His music was the basis for the arrangement by Parsegh Ganachian (1885-1967), one of Gomidas’ disciples, which is performed today as the Armenian national anthem.

Birth of Nikol Aghbalian - March 24, 1873

An accomplished intellectual, educator, and public figure, Nikol Aghbalian was a self-appointed missionary of Armenian values wherever he went and wherever he worked, from the Caucasus to Beirut.

He was born in Tiflis in a working-class family. He graduated from the Lyceum Nersisian in Tiflis and the Kevorkian Seminary in Etchmiadzin, and he dedicated himself to teaching. At the same time, he started writing literary criticism for the monthly Murj, and the quality of his writing attracted the attention of the readership and the intelligentsia. Despite his precarious financial situation, he managed to follow university courses in Moscow, Paris, and Lausanne, although he was never able to graduate.

Aghbalian became a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation at a young age and he used his intellectual qualities to service the political cause. Since 1905, he was among the leading members of the Vernadun, the circle of intellectuals that gathered in the attic of poet Hovhannes Tumanian’s house to discuss literary and cultural issues of the day.

He was the principal of the Armenian school of Tehran between 1909 and 1912. He returned to Tiflis in 1913, where he became the editor of the A.R.F. newspaper Horizon and vice president of the Armenian Writers Society.After the beginning of World War I, Aghbalian was one of the founders of the Armenian National Council and played a crucial role in the organization of the Armenian volunteer movement that gave several battalions of Armenian soldiers to the Russian army fighting on the Caucasian front. When the retreat of the Russian forces brought thousands of survivors of the Armenian genocide from Western Armenia, he devoted himself to the daily work of sheltering, nourishing, and treating those refugees.

After the establishment of the Republic of Armenia, Aghbalian was elected a member of the Parliament and in 1919-1920 he became Minister of Education and Art. He established the grounds of the University of Yerevan and sponsored various educational and cultural initiatives. It is a well-known fact that his sponsorship of the yet unknown poet, Yeghishe Charents, whom he gave a job at the ministry, permitted him to concentrate on his literary creations.

After the sovietization of Armenia, he was incarcerated by the Bolshevik regime on February 9, 1921, and he was able to save his life, as well as many others, thanks to the popular rebellion of February 18, which liberated the prisoners, who had been condemned to death. After the end of the rebellion, he left Armenia and went to Tabriz, in Iran. A short time later, he moved to Alexandria (Egypt), where he worked as a teacher until 1928. In that year, he was among the initiators and founders of the Hamazkayin Armenian Educational and Editorial Society (today Hamazkayin Armenian Educational and Cultural Society). Later he moved with his friend and associate, the writer and educator Levon Shant (1869-1951), to Lebanon, where they founded the Armenian College (Jemaran) of Hamazkayin in Beirut (later Nshan Palanjian College and today Melanchton and Haig Arslanian College).

Until his death on August 15, 1947, Aghbalian followed an active schedule as a teacher and scholar. He taught the history of Armenian literature, Classical Armenian, and Armenian classical literature. He also organized a cycle of widely attended popular lectures to attract the interest of the Armenian community towards its literature and culture. He remained one of the intellectual referents of the Diaspora in its first decades.

His extended activities as a public figure and an educator did not allow Aghbalian to complete many of his projects. However, he managed to publish several books on Armenian literature and politics, and a four-volume collection of his works was published in the late 1950s in Beirut.

His family remained in Yerevan after his exile in 1921. His name was forbidden in Armenia until the final years of the Soviet regime. His name and his work were fully rehabilitated after the second independence. Some of his works, as well as monographs about him, have been published, and a school has been named after him.

Birth of Alexander Tamanian - March 16, 1878

Alexander Tamanian was the founder of Armenian modern architecture. His vision for Yerevan was going to turn the village-like capital of Armenia in the 1920s into a modern city. 

Tamanian was born in Krasnodar (Northern Caucasus). He graduated from the Arts Academy of St. Petersburg in 1904. His first work was the reconstruction of the Armenian church of St. Catherine in St. Petersburg in 1904-1906. Following the excavations of Nikolai Marr in Ani, he projected the museum of Ani in 1908, which was not realized. 

He would develop a very successful career as architect in Russia. His blueprints for different building in various cities of Russia from 1907-1913 (the house of Scherbatov in Moscow, in 1911-1913, won the golden medal of the City Duma) applied the forms of classicism and Russian architecture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was elected full member of the Russian Art Academy in 1914 and became president of the Council of the Russian Art Academy, with status of vice-president of the Academy, in 1917.

The independence of Armenia in 1918 opened a new page in his life. He moved to Yerevan in 1919 to serve his country. He designed the coat-of-arms of the Republic, together with painter Hakob Kojoyan, which was restored as Armenia’s national coat of arms in 1992. Following the sovietization of Armenia, he left for Iran in 1921 and accepted the invitation of the Soviet Armenian government to return in 1923. 

Thereafter, and until his death on February 11, 1936 in Yerevan, he developed a very active professional life. In 1923 he was designated deputy chairman of the State Planning Committee. He became chairman of the Committee for Conservation of Monuments in 1924. 

In the same year, he created the master plan of the city of Yerevan, which signaled the beginning of Soviet city construction in Armenia. It was conceived for a city of 150,000 inhabitants (Yerevan had 25,000 at the time of the first Republic) and became the basis for the subsequent blueprints of the city. In 1934 he started the project for “Great Yerevan” (500,000 inhabitants), which remained unfinished. 

He also designed the plans for various cities between 1925 and 1933, including Gumri, Vagharshapat, Stepanakert, Gavar, and Hrazdan among others. He designed and built in Yerevan the morgue of the Medical Institute (1926-1933), the astronomical observatory (1930-1933), the National Library (1932-1938), and others, and his talent as a great architect was recognized particularly with his master plan of Yerevan, and the buildings of the Government House (1932-1941, State Prize of the USSR in 1942) and the Opera and Ballet Theater and Concert Hall (1926-1953). 

These two buildings predetermined and conditioned the architectonical solutions for

the most important urban points of Yerevan: the ensemble of the Republic Square (State Prize of Armenia in 1970), the area adjacent to the Opera Theater (the blueprint won the Great Golden Medal of the World Exhibition of 1937 in Paris), and the construction of the Northern Avenue, recently executed. Tamanian’s creations reinterpreted the principles of classical Armenian architecture with new quality, and opened new ways to develop their traditions in what has been called the “Tamanian School.” In 1936, Poet Yeghishe Charents wrote his poem “Vision of Death,” the third one with this title, in memory of the recently deceased architect. He started with the following lines:

“He saw a solar city...

As a sundial, drawn upon the blue side of pure marble,

here is the map of the city.

Avenues, streets, extending in circles,

and in the center, a granite altar reaching to the sky.”

Approval of the Polozhenye (Statute) of the Armenian Church - March 11, 1836

The Russian Empire conquered Eastern Armenia between 1805 and 1828. Bishop Nerses Ashtaraketsi (1771-1857) had supported the Russian conquest of Eastern Armenia in the belief that liberation from Persian rule would bring greater freedom to the Armenian people. However, he had been blindsided; his opposition to General Field Marshal Ivan Paskevich (1782-1856), who was the commander of the Caucasian front during the Russo-Persian and Russo-Turkish wars of 1826-1829, earned him to be exiled to Besarabia as primate of the Armenian diocese in 1828. 

The Russian government immediately took measures to regulate its relations with the Catholicosate of All Armenians, headquartered in Holy Etchmiadzin. Paskevich obtained special permission from the government to establish a set of rules. He formed a four-member committee in 1829, which produced a statute of the Armenian Church on January 8, 1830. 

The preliminary version was revised in Saint Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, and after certain changes it was presented to Czar Nicholas I (1825-1855), who approved it on March 11, 1836. These bylaws, officially titled “On the Management of the Spiritual Activities of the Armenian Gregorian Church,” were included in the eleventh volume of the Russian code, and popularly known as Polozhenye (“statute,” in Russian). (The name “Gregorian” is a misnomer of the Armenian Church, as it was not founded by St. Gregory the Illuminator, but by the Apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew.)

The Polozhenye, composed of 141 articles, greatly reduced the political powers of the Armenian religious leadership, including that of the Catholicos, while preserving the autonomy of the Armenian Church. It established a Synod that would oversee the activities of the Catholicos. After 1836, in agreement with the new regulation, the Catholicos of Etchmiadzin was to be elected in congresses in Etchmiadzin, in which religious and non-religious dignitaries would participate. 

Nerses Ashtaraketsi, elected Catholicos of All Armenians in 1843 (1843-1857) fought to restore the rights of the Catholicos curtailed by the Polozhenye. Realizing that one tyranny had been replaced with another, Catholicos Nerses frequently overlooked the Russian-approved statutes and worked on his own. He concentrated all ecclesiastical power in his hands and did not complete the members of the Synod. He made sure that the resolutions of the Synod were not approved and thus reduced its effectiveness to naught. He even wrote a new statute for the Armenian Church that was not submitted to the government for approval, but he used it as the Church’s own guideline.  

Nevertheless, the Polozhenye continued to be applied in Eastern Armenia until the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917.

Birth of Martiros Saryan - February 28, 1880

The 20,000 dram banknote of the Republic of Armenia features painter Martiros Saryan, who was one of the two people publicly known and recognized in the twentieth century as Varbed (“Master”); the other was poet Avetik Isahakian (1875-1957).

Saryan was born in the Armenian community of Nor-Nakhichevan (the town is today part of the city of Rostov-on-the-Don, in the Northern Caucasus). His ancestors were from the medieval capital of Ani and had first migrated to Crimea in the Middle Ages. Afterwards, they moved to Nor-Nakhichevan, founded by Empress Catherine II of Russia in 1780. The town and its surrounding villages were the birthplace of many important figures of Armenian history, such as Mikael Nalbandian, Simon Vratzian, and Catholicos Guevorg VI, to name just a few.

Martiros Saryan studied in the public bilingual (Armenian and Russian) school of his town and graduated in 1895. After following elementary studies of art in his birthplace, he studied painting from 1897-1904 in the School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture of Moscow. He visited Eastern Armenia for the first time in 1901-1902 and sojourned in Yerevan, Vagharshapat, and Ani, among other places. This trip was crucial for his formative years, as it gave him a fundamental knowledge and appreciation of the history, culture, arts, and customs of his people. Following graduation, he completed two years of postgraduate studies in portrait technique. He was in close touch with many members of the Russian intelligentsia and participated in various collective exhibitions in Moscow. He visited Constantinople, Egypt, and Persia in 1910-1913.

From an initial period of pure realism, after 1903 he entered a phase characterized as being “fantastic” painting. His works of the 1910s, while they marked a certain return to realism, were far from being purely realistic. He merged the color thinking of Paul Gauguin, the tri-dimensional understanding of Paul Cézanne, the linear view of Vincent Van Gogh, and certain principles of Armenian medieval miniature, fresco painting, and architecture achieving an entirely “Saryanesque” quality.

He worked in the Moscow Committee to Aid Armenians during the years of the Armenian Genocide and traveled to Echmiadzin in order to help the Western Armenian refugees. The psychological shock he suffered from the dire situation of the refugees was strong enough to have him moved to a hospital in Tiflis. In 1916 he participated in the formation of the Union of Armenian Artists, together with several famous painters (Vardgues Sureniants, Panos Terlemezian, Yeghishe Tadevosian, and others). He later returned to his birthplace.

He moved to Armenia in 1921 with his family and settled in Yerevan. He was named director of the State Museum of Armenia. He also contributed to the organization of the Committee of Conservation of Antiquities and Art, of which he was president, the Union of Workers of Plastic Arts and the Art Institute of Yerevan. He created the coat of arms of Soviet Armenia together with the painter Hakob Kojoyan, who was one of the coauthors of the coat of arms of the Republic of Armenia (the one in use today), in 1921. He participated in the fourteenth Biennale of Venice in 1924. He received the Grand Prix of the World’s Fair of Paris in 1937 for his decoration of the pavilion of the Soviet Union. His works of the Soviet period, perhaps the most known by the general public, marked a return to realism.

Saryan continued to be actively involved in public life and was president of the Union of Painters of Armenia from 1945-1951. He received various honors: full member of the Academy of Arts of the Soviet Union in 1947, full member of the Academy of Sciences of Armenia in 1956, Popular Painter of the USSR in 1960, Hero of Socialist Work (1965), etc.

The house-museum of Martiros Saryan that contains a good portion of his artistic works was opened in 1967. Other paintings are housed in the State Gallery of Armenia and its branches, the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, museums of various former Soviet countries, and private collections in the United States, France, and other countries.

Saryan passed away at the age of 92 in Yerevan, on May 5, 1972. In 1986, his statue was erected on the homonymous square, in front of the Opera. One of the central streets of the capital is also named in his honor.

Birth of Artur Tarkhanian - February 23, 1932

Some of the most representative buildings of the city of Yerevan are related to the name of architect Artur Tarkhanian.

He was born in Yerevan in 1932. He graduated from the Polytechnic Institute (now Yerevan State Engineering University) in 1957. Upon graduation, he started his career at the Haypetnakhagitz (Armenian State Project) Institute. He taught at Yerevan State University of Architecture and Construction since 1968. He was conferred the titles of Emeritus Architect of Armenia in 1972 and of People’s Architect in 1987, and became an honorary member of the Moscow branch of the International Academy of Architecture in 1992.

Tarkhanian was distinguished with several all-Soviet prizes, among them the Creativity Medal for Young Architects (1962 and 1968), achievements of Soviet architecture in the period 1973-1977, Best Construction of the Year (1982), Best Creation of the Year (1985). He also received the Anania Shirakatsi Medal of the Republic of Armenia (1998). 

Tarkhanian’s name is linked, together with his coauthors, to some of the best known buildings and monuments, such as:

- The branches of the Social Sciences institutes of the National Academy of Sciences (1955-1972);
- The monument to the victims of the Armenian Genocide on the Tzitzernakaberd hill (1967);
- The “Ayrarat” cinema hall, formerly known as “Rossiya” (1970-1974, winner of the prize of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union in 1979);
- The Youth Palace (1970-1985, winner of the Prize of the all-Soviet Communist Youth Union in 1981);
- The Sports and Music Complex (1984, winner of the State Prize of the USSR in 1987);
- The Zvartnots Airport (1981, winner of the State Prize of Armenia in 1985);
- The monument to painter Martiros Saryan (1986);
 - The monument to singer Charles Aznavour in Gumri (2001); etc.

The prize-winning Youth Palace has been regarded as one of the representative works of Soviet modernism. Unfortunately, this collective work of Tarkhanyan and his colleagues Hrach Poghosyan and Spartak Khachikian was sold by the government and demolished by its new owner in 2006—the same year of Tarkhanian’s death—despite expert opinion that the building only needed to be renovated. The 18-floor Youth Palace, containing a hotel, a revolving cafe on the top floor (like the Marriott Hotel in Manhattan), two halls with a capacity of 1,000 and 300 seats, and its many artworks, which had been a popular place in the 1970s and 1980s, went down into history. Until today, the site remains empty.

Artur Tarkhanian (middle) reviewing architectural plans with colleagues.

Birth of Hayganoush Mark - February 14, 1885

Armenian female writers were not very common at the beginning of the twentieth century. Following the line opened by Eliz Gesaratsian, Serpouhie Dussape, Zabel Asadour, and Zabel Essayan, along came Hayganoush Mark, who became the mainstay of Armenian feminism in Constantinople during the first half of the twentieth century.

There are several options for her year of birth, as she gave different dates. However, her tombstone says 1885. She studied at the Essayan Lyceum, where one of her main teachers was poet Zabel Asadour (1863-1934). She entered the literary arena at the turn of the twentieth century. Besides her poetry and prose, she was particularly active as a journalist and an advocate for female rights and social issues.

Her activism prompted her to publish the journal Dzaghig (1905-1907) at the age of 24. Despite its short duration, Dzaghig focused the attention of female writers and opened a window on their issues. She married journalist Vahan Toshigian in 1907 and moved to Smyrna, where she published the women’s page of his newspaper Arshaluys. 

Her most important achievement was the publication of the journal Hay Guin (1919-1933) in Constantinople. Published in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide, the journal raised issues of feminism, the situation of women survivors, and other social questions until the rise of Kemalism. Hayganoush Mark’s incisive style gained her wide popularity. Afterwards, mounting political pressure on the Armenian community forced her to tone down her articles, until the closing of the journal by the Turkish government in 1933. The reasons remained unclear.

She published a volume of literary works, From My Moments of Idleness, in 1921. The fiftieth anniversary of her literary and journalistic work was celebrated in 1954 in Istanbul. A book called Hayganoush Mark: Her Life and Deeds was published in 1954. Her health worsened in her last years and she moved to the Armenian Hospital of Istanbul, where she passed away on March 7, 1966. Her library and belongings were bequeathed to the Seminary of Surp Khach (closed years later by the government and turned into a high school).