Death of Missak Manouchian - February 21, 1944

French Armenian filmmaker Robert Guédiguian’s movie, “The Army of Crime,” which Richard Brody praised in The New Yorker (2010) as “vigorously heroic yet mournful Second World War drama,” reconstructed the deeds and the downfall of a group of foreign members of the French Resistance led by Armenian poet and activist Missak Manouchian (Manoushian).

Manouchian was born on September 1, 1906, in Adiyaman (vilayet of Mamuret-ul-Aziz). He survived the Armenian Genocide, harbored by a Kurdish family. His brother Karabet also survived the Genocide.  Both orphaned siblings were accepted at an orphanage in Syria. They finally made their way to Marseilles in 1925.

The brothers moved to Paris, where Karabet Manouchian died in 1927. Missak had taken a job at a plant of the automobile company Citroën and joined a member of the General Confederation of Labour, a national association of trade unions that was the first of the major French confederations. He lost his job in the early 1930s, at the time of the Great Depression. He joined the Communist Party in 1934 and became secretary of the Committee of Assistance to Armenia (Hayastani Oknutian Gomide or HOG) the next year and editor of its weekly Zanku. In one of the meetings of the Committee, he met his future wife Melinée Assadourian (1913-1989).

Manouchian was a poet who founded two left-leaning literary magazines, Chank and Mshaguyt, with a fellow Communist friend and poet, Sema (Kegham Atmadjian). Besides their own poetry, they published articles on French literature and Armenian literature.

At the beginning of World War II, the young poet was evacuated from Paris as a foreigner. He returned after the defeat to Germany in June 1940 and was briefly arrested by the German authorities of occupation in June 1941, when the invasion of the Soviet Union began, but released a few weeks later by the efforts of his wife.

After becoming the political head of the Armenian section of the underground MOI (Immigrant Workforce Movement), the branch of foreign members of the Communist Party, from 1941-1943, Manouchian transferred in February 1943 to the FTP-MOI, a group of gunmen and saboteurs attached to the MOI in Paris. The group carried out almost thirty successful attacks on German interests from August to November 1943.

The Special Brigade No. 2 of the General Intelligence, a collaborationist French police force, undertook a large operation against resistance activists, which eventually led to the complete dismantling of the FTP-MOI network in Paris. A total of 68 persons were arrested, including Manouchian on the morning of November 16, 1943, in Évry Petit-Bourg. His wife managed to escape and survive the war.

Manouchian and the others were tortured to gain information, and eventually handed over to the Germans. The inner circle of twenty-three people (eleven Jewish, five Italians, three French, two Armenians, one Spaniard, and one Polish) was given a 1944 show trial for propaganda purposes before execution. Twenty-two men were shot on February 21, 1944, at Fort Mont-Valérien, near Paris. The only woman of the group was beheaded in the prison at Stuttgart (Germany) three months later. After the liberation, Manouchian would be posthumously awarded the highest order of the Legion of Honor.

In the wake of the execution, the Germans printed 15,000 propaganda posters on red background paper. The red posters (Affiche Rouge) bore photos of ten of the dead. The center photo of Manouchian had the following inscription: “Armenian gang leader, 56 bombings, 150 dead, 600 wounded.” The poster was intended to portray the Resistance as murderous foreigners who were a danger to law-abiding citizens. But people marked the red posters with "Morts pour la France!" (They died for France). Pasted on walls all over Paris, the posters became emblems of martyrdom by freedom fighters, and contributed to popular support for the Resistance.

The last letter of Manouchian to his wife stated: “I joined the Army of Liberation as a volunteer, and I die within inches of Victory and the final goal. Happy will be all those who will survive and taste the sweetness of Freedom and Peace of tomorrow. I'm sure that the French people and all the freedom combatants will know how to honor our memory with dignity. . . . With the help of friends who would like to honor me, you shall publish my poems and writings that are worth being read. You shall take my memories, if possible, to my relatives in Armenia.”

A commemorative plaque and a fresco remember the Manouchian group in Paris, as well as a park and a memorial in Évry Petit-Bourg. A street bears Manouchian’s name in Yerevan.

The February Revolt - February 18, 1921

A New York Times article headline from March 17, 1921

The government of the Republic of Armenia transferred the power to the incoming Armenian Bolsheviks on December 2, 1921, and the first independence came to an end: Armenia became a Soviet republic, nominally independent. The Military-Revolutionary Committee (Revkom) led by Sarkis Kasian arrived in Yerevan on December 6. 

The transference of government and loss of independence had been the choice between the lesser of two evils. On the west, Armenia had been defeated by the Turkish nationalist forces that responded to Mustafa Kemal, which had occupied Alexandropol, and the danger of a new massacre that would complete the genocide loomed over the country. It was expected that the new government, while dealing with the Turks with the sponsorship of Soviet Russia, would also address the myriad of problems that affected the exhausted population. 

This did not happen. The newcomers, instead, caught in the fever of revolution and war communism, tried to apply to Armenia the same recipes that were being practiced in Soviet Russia.  Food was requisitioned from the starving population to be sent to Russia as “help from the Armenian workers.”  Repression against the former government and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation started. In late December about 1,200 high-ranking officers of the army of independent Armenia were arrested, including the heroes of the May 1918 battles, like generals Tovmas Nazarbekian, Movses Silikian, Daniel Bek-Pirumian, and Dro. They were forced to walk from Yerevan to Alaverdi (about 100 miles), and then dispatched to prisons in Baku and Russia; Daniel Bek-Pirumian, hero of the battle of Sardarabad, was shot in the Yerevan prison in February 1921. 

Economic suffering and political violence led to the brewing of a popular movement to put an end to the situation. In February 1921 many prominent A.R.F. members, who had also been active in the years of the Republic, like Levon Shant, Nikol Aghbalian, and Hovhannes Kajaznuni, were arrested. Some of them were killed in prison by Azeri killers armed with axes. Others were saved by the rebellion, which started on February 13 amid a group of refugees from Sasun who had settled on the foot of Mount Aragatz. In the next four days, the rebel forces, now headed by members of the A.R.F. who had eluded persecution, took Ashtarak, Echmiadzin, Garni, and Hrazdan. Yerevan was liberated on February 18 and the Bolshevik-led Military Revolutionary Committee retreated. The rebellion had been helped by the fact that the troops of the XI Red Army had been taken out of Armenia to participate in the sovietization of Georgia. 

On February 18 the independence of Armenia was again proclaimed and the “Committee for the Salvation of the Homeland” took power under the leadership of the last prime minister of the independent Republic, Simon Vratzian. It issued an order that stated: “The Bolshevik regime in Armenia has been eliminated. Until the formation of a government, the whole authority is in the hands of the Committee for the Salvation of the Homeland.” A message to the delegation of the Republic of Armenia and to the leaders of the world powers, sent on the same day, remained unanswered. A response to a message sent to Georgia was received on February 21, when the Armenian embassy was reopened in Tiflis. However, four days later Georgia fell to the Soviet forces, and the rebellion in Armenia was left alone against the Communist forces. There was no help from the outside world, because it was obvious that the rebellion would fail sooner or later; the Soviet forces in Armenia had the support of Soviet Russia. 

Bloody battles took place between the opposing sides during the short-lived period of freedom. The Bolsheviks attacked Yerevan on February 27, but were forced to retreat on March 1. After a two-week stop, they attacked again and briefly took Ashtarak, but were repelled on March 17. However, the numerical superiority of the Bolsheviks became crucial. Their great offensive started on March 24 and nine days later, on April 2, Yerevan fell. 

The A.R.F. forces retreated without opposing serious resistance to avoid the destruction of the capital. Thousands of people, both civilians and soldiers, retreated to Zangezur, where the Republic of Mountainous Armenia had been formed, and joined the forces of Garegin Nzhdeh. The resistance ended in July, while the refugees and the leaders of the rebellion had already crossed the border to Persia. 

The reasons of the revolt were later discussed by the Bolshevik authorities in Russia and the Military-Revolutionary Committee was replaced in April 1921 by the Council of People’s Commissars, led by Alexander Miasnikian until his death in 1925, whose policies ensured a more tolerant treatment of the population, the end of the rebellion, and the partial return of some of the refugees from Persia.

Death of Armen Tigranian - February 10, 1950

They were brother and sister, and had very divergent ways. While Armen (1879-1950) was a musician and became an artist emeritus of the Republics of Armenia and Georgia, Armenuhi (1888-1962) was a poet and became an expatriate with her husband Vartkes Aharonian, son of novelist Avetis Aharonian and a literary critic and public figure himself (people of certain age in the East Coast and particularly in New York will probably recall the Aharonians as teachers, writers, and lecturers).

Armen Tigranian was born in Alexandropol (now Gumri) on December 26, 1879. He played the flute from an early age and participated in the concerts of the woodwind orchestra at his school. His family moved to Tiflis in 1894 when he was fifteen. Eight years later he graduated from the classes of flute and musical theory of the School of Music; he had also taken lessons of composition from Makar Ekmalian, the noted author of the Armenian polyphonic mass. In the same year, 1902, he returned to Alexandropol. He organized school and popular choirs; the latter toured Tiflis, Baku, and Kars. He composed his first songs at this time with lyrics from poets like Avetik Isahakian and Hovhannes Hovhannisian, as well as arrangements of Armenian folkloric songs.

 

In 1908, at the age of 29, Tigranian started to write his first opera, Anush, based on the celebrated poem by Hovhannes Tumanian, which laid the ground for a new stylistic orientation in the Armenian music theater. Fragments of the opera were presented in Tiflis in the same year. A complete version of Anush was staged for the first time in Alexandropol four years later. The opera was the first composed in Eastern Armenian, and its Alexandropol performance was the first presentation of an opera in Armenia. For the next thirty years, the composer introduced some changes and additions, and revised the musical arrangement of his work. The opera was particularly remarkable for the scenes of popular feasts and ceremonies, as well as its lyrical songs, duets, and choir songs. Some of the melodies composed by Tigranian became very popular and continue to be popular to this day.

 

Tigranian commemorated on an Armenian stamp.

The composer moved back to Tiflis in 1913. He participated in the activities of the Armenian Musical Society (1913-1921), taught at the Hovnanian School and gave concerts. He wrote new works, such as music for the drama Layla and Majnun (1918), the Oriental Dance for symphonic orchestra, and choral works, and made arrangements of folkloric songs. 

Tigranian continued his creative endeavors during the 1920s and 1930s, and produced songs, cantatas, choral works, and piano works (Dance Song, Suite of Armenian Dances, Oriental Fantasy, Emerald of Shirak, Child Album, etcetera). Anush was staged for the first time at the Opera of Yerevan in 1935. 

During World War II, Tigranian started to work, among other pieces, on a new opera, David Bek, based on Raffi’s homonymous novel. The subject, which was the heroic resistance of the Armenians of Siunik against Persian and Turkish invasion in the 1720s, was suited to fit patriotic feelings, which were on the rise at the time in the Soviet Union. As in the case of Anush, the new opera included many elements of village music. He finished the opera in 1949, but it was premiered posthumously in 1950 at the Opera of Yerevan.

Besides writing music for many plays, Tigranian translated the librettos of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto and George Bizet’s Carmen into Armenian.

Tigranian’s house-museum is located in his birthplace, Gumri, while streets and music schools in Gumri and Yerevan have been named after him. His statue graces the Ring Park of Yerevan.

 

A scene from the opera Anush staged by the Gyumri Opera Company

 

 

Birth of Zabel Yesayan - February 4, 1878

Zabel Yesayan was a gifted novelist. Hagop Oshagan, her contemporary and another great writer and literary critic, assessed her in the following terms: “The work of Madam Yesayan is a whole. Its two big poles, the soul of individuals and the collective sensitivity of peoples, have been eternally conquered in indestructible works. Z. Yesayan is the most complete success of Western Armenian literature.” But she was also an activist for the rights of women and the rights of her people. “Women have not come to the world just to be pleasing,” she wrote. “Women have come to develop their mind and their intellectual, moral, and physical qualities. The ideal of all self-respecting women should not be just to please, but to become a beneficial element on this world.”

Born Zabel Hovhannesian in Scutari (nowadays Uskudar), a suburb of Constantinople, she attended the local Surp Khach School, and her aim was to become a writer. She managed to go to Paris at the age of seventeen, in 1895, and study literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne. Her prolific literary career started in the same year with a prose poem published in the literary periodical Tsaghik, published by Arshak Chobanian in Constantinople. She went on to publish short stories, literary essays, articles, and translations, both in French and in Armenian, in periodicals such as Mercure de France, Masis, Anahit, and Arevelian Mamoul. She would also publish two novels, In the Waiting Room (1903) and Decent People (1907).

She first signed with her maiden name, and soon, after she married painter Dikran Yesayan (1874-1921), she adopted her nom de plume that made her famous. They would have two children, Sophie and Hrant.

After the Ottoman Revolution of 1908, Zabel Yesayan returned to Constantinople, where she was active in literary and public affairs. After the Adana massacres of 1909, she was a member of the Investigative Commission set up by the Armenian Patriarchate and was sent to Cilicia in this capacity. The tragic fate of the Armenians in Cilicia inspired her masterpiece testimony of the catastrophe, Amid the Ruins (1911), as well as a series of articles, a novella, and short stories.

She was the only woman in the list of intellectuals to be arrested and deported on the fateful night of April 23-24, 1915, but she was able to avoid that dubious honor and to find refuge in Bulgaria months later. She was later joined by her mother and her son (her daughter lived with her husband in Paris).

She went to the Caucasus, and worked actively for the next three years, both in Tiflis and Baku, gathering testimonies of survivors, which she also translated in order to provide information to the French press. After reaching Paris in 1919, she went to Cilicia and Beirut in 1920-1921 to collaborate in the relocation of refugees and orphans.

Returning to Paris, she published the novellas The Last Cup and My Soul Exiled, the latter being another of her best works. She published other works in the 1920s, when she also left the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, of which she had been a member, and took a pro-Soviet orientation. She visited Soviet Armenia in 1926 and wrote down her impressions in a travelogue entitled Prometheus Unchained (1928). Finally, she settled down in Yerevan in 1933 with her children. She taught French literature at Yerevan State University and participated in the first Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow (1934). She published two books during her last years, most importantly her childhood memoir, The Gardens of Silihdar (1935), considered her masterpiece.

Zabel Yesayan, holding the Armenian Tricolor, with her family in Paris.

After surviving 1915, it was an irony that she returned to Armenia to contribute in the rebuilding of the country, only to become yet another victim of the regime four years later. The Stalinist purges claimed her life, together with her younger colleagues Yeghishe Charents, Axel Bakunts, Vahan Totovents, and others, whom she tried to defend. She was arrested and deported in 1937. Going from prison to prison, she managed to write a few letters to her daughter and her daughter-in-law. The last one was sent from Baku in late 1942. Afterwards, there was complete silence.

As she wrote in The Gardens of Silihdar, “... I take refuge in them [the gardens] every time ominous dark clouds pile up on the horizon of my life.” Perhaps that helped her resist almost six years of exile and physical and moral suffering. One unconfirmed version says that she was drowned in the Caspian Sea in late 1942 or early 1943, at the age of 65. But her works lived to turn her into the “great lady” of Armenian literature.

Birth of Paruyr Sevak - January 26, 1924

Paruyr Sevak was the successor of Yeghishe Charents in Soviet Armenian poetry, and was widely admired during his lifetime. Both had a short life, tragically cut off, although under different circumstances.

Paruyr Ghazarian was born in the small village of Chanakhchi (now Zangakatun), in the district of Ararat, in Armenia. His parents were humble villagers. He attended the local school and graduated with honors in 1940, moving to Yerevan to study at the philological faculty of Yerevan State University. He had written his first poetry at the age of thirteen, and three of his poems appeared for the first time in the monthly Sovetakan Grakanutiun in 1942, with the signature Paruyr Sevak. The editor of the monthly, Ruben Zarian, was a literary scholar fond of Rupen Sevag, a fine poet who had been killed together with Taniel Varoujan in the Armenian genocide, and thought of perpetuating his memory by using his name as a pseudonym for the 18-year-old beginner.

Sevak graduated in 1945 and started postgraduate studies of Armenian literature at the Manuk Abeghian Institute of Literature of the Armenian Academy of Sciences. However, he had to cut his studies short in 1948. In the same year, he published his first book, The Immortals Command. He married linguist Maya Avagian and had a son, Hrachia.

In 1951 he moved to Moscow to study at the Maxim Gorky Institute of World Literature. There he met his future second wife, Nelly Menagharishvili, who would give him two more sons, Armen and Koriun. He graduated in 1955 and worked there from 1957-1959 as an instructor at the chair of Literary Translation.

Meanwhile, during the eight years of ostracism, he had managed to publish poetry, translations, and literary criticism in the Soviet Armenian press. His three books of poetry, however (Uncomprising Intimacy, 1953; Love Road, 1954; and With You Again, 1957), failed to unleash his entire potential. His long poem of 1959, The Unsilenced Belfry, dedicated to the life of Komitas Vardapet, made his name instantly known by Armenian readers throughout the world. The book earned him the National Prize of Armenia in 1966.

Sevak went back to Yerevan in late 1959, and returned to the Manuk Abeghian Institute of Literature as a scholarly researcher from 1963-1971. He served as secretary of the Board of the Writers Union of Armenia from 1966-1971. In 1968 he was elected a representative at the Supreme Soviet of the Armenian SSR.

During the sixties, Sevak became the most powerful voice of Armenian poetry, and his articles on literary and public issues were widely read. In 1963 he published a groundbreaking collection of poetry, The Man in the Palm, which marked the return to the path of modernism that had been closed since the death of Charents a quarter of a century before.

In 1966 the poet and scholar defended a doctoral dissertation on the life and work of Sayat-Nova, the popular troubadour of the eighteenth century. After a defense of his dissertation that lasted four hours, his work was so highly esteemed that he was conferred with a second doctorate degree when the dissertation was approved and published in 1969.

Paruyr Sevak was not a dissident, but, as many intellectuals under the Soviet regime, some of his work clashed with censorship. This was particularly notorious when his last collection of poetry, Let There Be Light, was printed in 1969, but because of censorship issues, the entire edition of 25,000 copies remained undistributed until his death on June 17, 1971, in a car crash, while driving back to Yerevan. His wife also died in the crash, and only his two children survived. The circumstances of the accident were suspicious, and they have given fodder to lingering doubts about foul play by the Soviet regime.

The 47-year-old poet and his wife were buried in the backyard of his home, in Chanakhchi, which later became a museum. The village was renamed Zangakatun after the independence of Armenia in honor of his poem The Unsilenced Belfry (Անլռելի զանգակատուն, Anlreli zangakatun).

Birth of Dikran Khan Kelekian - January 19, 1868

The Assyrian reliefs of Genii and King Assurnasirpal, as well as the winged bull and lion from the ninth-century B.C. Palace of Assurnasirpal, which are today at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, were originally acquired in 1932 by John D. Rockefeller. The seller was a notable collector and dealer of Islamic art, Dikran Kelekian, who by that time was working together with his son, Charles (1900-1982). The representation of the head of Tutankhamun, seen in the museum's collection and on the cover of the catalogue of the Egyptian Wing, was acquired from the Kelekians in the late 1940s.

Dikran Kelekian was born in Caesarea (Kayseri) to a family originally from Persia. He was the son of an Armenian banker. He studied ancient Near Eastern history at Robert College (now Bogazici University) in Constantinople (now Istanbul) and continued his education in Paris. He set himself up, with his brother Kevork, in the antiquities business in Constantinople at the age of 24 and soon acquired a reputation as a knowledgeable collector and dealer specializing in Islamic art, particularly pottery. He came to the United States in 1893 as a commissioner for the Persian Pavilion at the Chicago World’s Fair. He soon established shops in New York (Le Musée de Bosphore), Paris, London, and Cairo, where he and his brother flourished as vendors, selling works of art and antiquities.

In 1902 the Shah of Persia elevated Kelekian to the title of khan and appointed him to serve as the Persian consul in New York. His gallery became the headquarters of the consulate. He served as a member of the jury for the Paris World’s Fair of 1900, and was the general commissar of the Persian Empire at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition de Saint Louis, also known as St. Louis World’s Fair (1904), mounting a large display of his wares, accompanied with an illustrated catalogue. He eventually became an American citizen. His collections were featured in a number of international exhibitions in Paris, Munich, London, and New York over the decades. He is the author of Potteries of Persia, Being a Brief History of the Arts of Ceramics in the Near East (1909).

Kelekian was a member of the Central Board of Directors of the Armenian General Benevolent Union and in 1909 he funded an AGBU orphanage bearing his name in Deort Yol (Cilicia) for Armenian refugees fleeing the Adana massacres.

Regarded as the “dean of antiquities” in the United States, he acted as an adviser to great American collectors, including Henry Walters, George Blumenthal, and Louisine and Henry Havemeyer. Art critic Roger Fry described him as having an "omnivorous acquisitiveness." In his book The Kelekian Collection of Persian and Analogous Potteries, 1885-1910 (1910), he stated his aesthetic views. For him, Persian art was a precursor of avant-garde art, which he defended with passion. Along with Coptic, Paleo-Christian, or Persian art, his gallery promoted the works of Matisse, Rouault, Derain, and Picasso in the United States.

Kelekian’s Cairo gallery served as a base for purchasing Egyptian antiquities, including Late Antique, commonly referred to as Coptic, textiles. In 1943 Milton Avery painted Kelekian in his gallery, posed before a Coptic textile. The “School of Paris” rendered homage to him with an exhibition of twenty-one portraits at the Gallery Durand Ruel (1944).

At age 83, Kelekian died in January 1951, when he fell from the twenty-first floor of the St. Moritz hotel in New York. His son first took the succession, and then the business was maintained by his granddaughter Nanette until 1990. Sometime in the early twentieth century, Kelekian had assembled an album of approximately one thousand textile fragments, which she donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2002.

Birth of Sergei Parajanov - January 9, 1924

"Everyone knows that I have three Motherlands. I was born in Georgia, worked in Ukraine and I'm going to die in Armenia," declared Sergei Parajanov, one of the most talented names of Soviet cinematography. Despite running afoul of censorship and repression, his original cinematic style made significant contributions to Ukrainian, Armenian, and Georgian cinema.

Parajanov was born in Tiflis, capital of Georgia, to Iosif Parajanov and Siranush Bejanova. At the age of 21, he traveled to Moscow (1945), enrolled in the directing department of VGIK (the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography), the oldest film school in Europe, and studied under directors Igor Savchenko and Aleksandr Dovzhenko.

In 1948 he was convicted of homosexual acts and sentenced to five years in prison, but was released under an amnesty after three months. In video interviews, friends and relatives contested the truthfulness of the charges. In 1950 he married his first wife, Nigyar Kerimova, from a Muslim Tatar family, in Moscow. She converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity to marry him, and was murdered by her relatives because of her conversion a year later. After her murder, he left Russia for Kiev (Ukraine), where he produced three documentaries and several narrative films. He married his second wife, Svetlana Sherbatiuk, in 1956. Their son Suren was born in 1958 and they divorced in 1962.

In 1964 Parajanov abandoned socialist realism (the state-sanctioned art style in the Soviet Union) and directed Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, a poetic film over which he had complete creative control. He would later dismiss all films he had directed before 1964 as “garbage.” This film won numerous international awards and turned him into a cult director.

He later left Kiev and moved to Armenia. He filmed Sayat Nova in 1968, choosing the life of the famous eighteenth-century Armenian troubadour as the apparent subject, but the film was immediately banned. He re-edited his footage and renamed the film The Color of Pomegranates. The film won much praise internationally and increased his popularity as a venerated director.

 A still from the movie The Color of Pomegranates.

His projects were systematically banned or scraped between 1965 and 1973 because of charges of deviation from accepted artistic norms, until Parajanov was sentenced to five years in a hard labor camp in Siberia on charges of homosexuality and pornography in December 1973. Many international artists protested on behalf of the filmmaker without effect, including Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Françoise Sagan, Yves Saint Laurent, Andrei Tarkovsky, and others. He obtained an early release in December 1977.

The imprisoned filmmaker produced a large number of miniature doll-like sculptures and some 800 drawings and collages, many of which are currently displayed at the Parajanov Museum in Yerevan.

Sergei Parajanov, Tarkovsky's Night Bird, 1987, Collage, Mixed Media.

After his return from prison to Tbilisi, he could not pursue his career. He was imprisoned again in February 1982 on charges of bribery and freed nine months later, although his health was seriously compromised after the harsh conditions of the Siberian camp.

After his release, the support of Georgian intellectuals allowed him to produce his last two films, which received critical and public acclaim: The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984) and Ashik Kerib (1988). He moved back to Armenia, where he started a project that would remain unfinished: his final film, The Confession. Its original film footage was assembled and released as Parajanov: The Last Spring, by his close friend Mikhail Vartanov in 1992.

Sergei Parajanov passed away on July 20, 1990, in Yerevan, a victim of cancer, at the age of 66. He left a legacy of sixteen films (feature and documentary), and ten unproduced screenplays and projects, including films on the Armenian legend of Ara the Beautiful and the Armenian epic David of Sassoun.