Terrorist attack on the National Assembly of Armenia (October 27, 1999)

The election of Karekin II as Catholicos of All Armenians had just been held on October 27, 1999 in the afternoon when the news of a terrorist attack on the building of the National Assembly in Yerevan came to Holy Echmiadzin.

At around 5:15 p.m., five men led by journalist Nairi Hunanyan, armed with AK-47 assault rifles hidden under long coats, stormed into the building while the government was holding a question-and-answer session. The group included Hunanyan’s brother Karen and uncle Vram, as well as Derenik Bejanyan and Eduard Grigoryan.

The main target was Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan (1959-1999). According to reporters who witnessed the shooting, the men went up to Sargsyan and said, "Enough of drinking our blood," to which he calmly responded, "Everything is being done for you and the future of your children." The Prime Minister was shot point blank several times. Seven other people were also shot dead. The list included National Assembly Speaker Karen Demirchyan and two Deputy Speakers, Yuri Bakhsyan and Ruben Miroyan; Minister of Emergency Affairs Leonard Petrosyan, and MPs Henrik Abrahamyan, Armenak Armenakyan, and Mikayel Kostanyan. Some 30 people were injured.

The group claimed they were carrying out a coup d'état in a "patriotic" act. They claimed that Armenia was in a "catastrophic situation" and that "corrupt officials" were not doing anything to find a way out. The gunmen held around 50 hostages inside the building, surrounded by policemen and army forces personnel positioned on Baghramyan Avenue. After overnight negotiations with President Robert Kocharian, the gunmen released the hostages and, after a standoff that lasted 17-18 hours, they gave themselves up on the morning of October 28.

President Kocharian declared a three-day mourning period. The state funeral ceremony for the victims of the parliament shooting took place from 30-31 October 1999. Their bodies were placed inside the Yerevan Opera Theater, with high-ranking officials from some 30 countries attending the funeral.

According to a poll carried out by the Center for Sociological Studies of the National Academy of Sciences on October 30-31, 56.9% of respondents said that the October 27 events were a crime against statehood and the country's authorities, and 63.4% believed that the terrorist group consisted of assassins–traitors and enemies.

Armenian American journalist Garin Hovannisian described the aftermath of the attack in the following terms: “For weeks the Armenians mourned in silence, but from their grief a startling theory began to evolve. The assassinations had been pinned on the terrorist leader, an ex-journalist named Nairi Hunanyan, but the public was not satisfied. The fact was that Prime Minister Sargsyan and Speaker Demirchyan had recently created in parliament an alliance for democratic reform, and they were the only men who commanded the resources and popularity to challenge the president one day. Of course, there was no actual evidence that Robert Kocharyan was complicit in this monstrous crime against the Armenian people, but it was clear that he emerged from the bloodbath with absolute power.”

A stamp commemorating the victims of the terrorist attack on the Armenian Parliament on October 27, 1999 issued by the Republic of Armenia in 2000.

From early June to late October 1999, the Unity alliance forged by Demirchan and Sargsyan, which controlled the military and the legislative and executive branches, had become the pillar of the political system in Armenia. Their murder disrupted the balance of power and the political arena was left in disarray for months. The assassination hit Armenia's international reputation and resulted in a decline in foreign investment. Political power was transferred to President Kocharyan.

The motives behind the attack were never fully explained. While the gunmen claimed to have acted on their own initiative, no convincing evidence was disclosed to suggest that any political leader or party was behind the attack, although abundant conspiracy theories flourished to prove that there had been a sabotage of a Karabagh peace deal. Aram Sargsyan, who briefly succeeded his elder brother Vazgen as Prime Minister from 1999-2000, stated in March 2013 that, "I have never accused this or the former authorities in being responsible for October 27. I have accused them in not fully disclosing October 27."

The five men were charged with terrorism aimed at undermining authority on October 29. The investigation was led by Chief Military Prosecutor Gagik Jhangiryan. At its end, the case was sent to court on July 12, 2000. The trial began on February 15, 2001, in Yerevan's Kentron and Nork-Marash District Court. The judicial case was transferred to the jurisdiction of Prosecutor General Aghvan Hovsepyan and his office, which finally closed the case for lack of evidence. Nairi Hunanyan and his co-conspirators were sentenced to life in prison on December 2, 2003.

Birth of Armin Wegner (October 16, 1886)

Armin T. Wegner was the German writer and human rights activist who documented graphically the Armenian Genocide. At the end of his life, he described it “as a solemn pledge to do everything possible to maintain alive the memory of the Armenian fate.” He was also one of the earliest voices to protest Adolf Hitler’s treatment of the Jews in Germany.

Armin T. Wegner, 1916 in Bagdad.

Wegner was born on October 16, 1886 in the town of Elberfeld / Rhineland (Wuppertal) in Germany. His father was a civil servant employed by the German Imperial Railroad and his mother was a suffragette and pacifist. He studied law and political science at the universities of Zurich, Paris, and Berlin, receiving his doctorate in jurisprudence from the University of Breslau in 1914. He also attended theater director Max Reinhardt’s acting school in Berlin between 1910 and 1912, and began his career as a freelance poet and journalist shortly before World War I.

At the outbreak of World War I, he enrolled as a volunteer nurse and served in Poland during the winter of 1914-1915. He was decorated with the Iron Cross for assisting the wounded under fire. From the autumn of 1915 to November 1916, following the military alliance of Germany and Turkey, he was stationed in Turkey as a member of the German Sanitary Corps. He served as a medical officer on the Baghdad staff of Field Marshal von der Goltz with the Sixth Ottoman Army. He witnessed and recorded with pen and camera the systematic deportation and annihilation of the Armenians, despite explicit Turkish prohibition. In late June 1916 he was arrested by soldiers of the German military mission in Turkey because of censorship violations and reassigned to serve as an orderly in cholera barracks in Baghdad. Taken ill with typhus, he was sent back to Berlin in November of the same year. Hidden in his belt were his photographic rolls with images of the genocide.

A photograph of Armenian orphans at a makeshift camp on the deportation road taken by Armin Wegner.

He completed his first two volumes about his experiences in Turkey by early 1917, and they would be published in 1919-1920. His first volume of poetry appeared in 1917, but it was banned. He did some editorial jobs in 1918-1919, and after the revolution of November 1918, he was able to openly publish fiction as well as articles and manifestos about the Armenian annihilation. In January 1919 he published an open letter to President Woodrow Wilson, where he protested against the atrocities perpetrated by the Turks and appealed for the independence of Armenia. Wegner delivered several illustrated slide lectures about the Armenian massacres in October 1919 and his short stories appeared throughout 1920-1921 in the press. He published several books related to the Armenian cause during the 1920s.

In 1930 he received a subsidy from the Prussian Academy of the Arts to complete his Armenian novel The Expulsion, in four volumes, which he never finished. He had married Jewish poet Lola Landau in 1921 and had lectured actively on the pacifist circuit, as well as published various travelogues. In 1927 he visited Soviet Armenia.

After the Nazi accession to power, Wegner’s works were banned, his books purged from the shelves of German libraries, and some were burned in the May 1933 book burnings. He addressed a letter to Hitler where he warned him that Jews would survive the danger and “the shame and misfortune will however be allotted to Germany and will not quickly be forgotten, even in the future.” He asked the German chancellor “to protect Germany by protecting the Jews.” The result was Wegner’s arrest and imprisonment in jail and then in various concentration camps from August 1933 to the spring of 1934.

After his liberation, Wegner followed his wife, who had fled to London with their daughter, but later returned to Germany. He also followed them when they immigrated to Palestine in 1935, and visited there in 1936 and 1937, but was unable to secure permanent residence. Wegner and Landau drifted away and were divorced in 1938.

Wegner, later in life.

Wegner was allowed to migrate to Italy in 1938. He lived with his common law wife Irene Kowaliska (he married her in 1945) in Positano and managed to survive periodical German persecution during the war and to live upon minor income until the end of the war. His prodigious literary productivity was severely affected. Most of his projects were never fulfilled. He returned to Germany for the first time in 1952, but found out that after twenty years, he could no longer return to his native land. He moved to Rome in 1956. The same year, he was awarded the Highest Order of Merit by the Federal German government. His birthplace Wuppertal decorated him with the prestigious Eduard-Von-der-Heydt prize in 1962.

His photographs of the genocide were rediscovered by the press in 1965. He also wrote a commemorative essay in the same year. In 1967 he was awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem in Israel, and in 1968 he received an invitation to Armenia from the Catholicos of All Armenians and was awarded the Order of Saint Gregory the Illuminator.

Wegner made a lecture tour of the United States in 1972, at the age of 86. He passed away in Rome on May 17, 1978. In 1996 part of his ashes were taken to Armenia, where a posthumous state funeral took place near the perpetual flame of the Armenian Genocide Monument.

Birth of Rouben Mamoulian (October 8, 1897)

Film and theater director Rouben Mamoulian has been perhaps the most influential Armenian artist on the world stage. His pioneering impact on direction, particularly in the 1920s-1940s, has been widely acknowledged.

Mamoulian was born in Tiflis (Georgia) to an Armenian family with roots in Lori and Nakhichevan. His father Zakaria was a former member of the Russian military and a banker. His mother Vergine Kalantarian-Mamoulian had been president of the Armenian Dramatic Society of Tiflis and an amateur actress on the Armenian scene. The Mamoulians spoke Russian at home, but Rouben learned to speak and to write Armenian at an early age. His primary education was at the Lycée Montaigne of Paris, where future French director René Clair was one of his classmates. Later, he continued his studies at the Russian high school of Tiflis and the School Law of Moscow University, while he also took classes at the theatrical courses opened by Armenian director Evgeni Vakhtangov at the Art Theater. He returned to Tiflis in 1918, where he opened a theatrical studio with Levon Kalantar and Suren Khachaturian, and published theatrical reviews in Russian and Armenian newspapers. He also wrote poetry in Russian.

Mamoulian moved to England in 1920, where his sister Svetlana was married to a Scottish soldier. He first directed Austin Page’s play The Beating on the Door in November 1922. Favorable reviews in the London press made him known in France and the United States. Russian opera singer Vladimir Rosing brought him to America the next year to teach at the newly founded Eastman School of Music (created by George Eastman, the founder and owner of Kodak Company) in Rochester (New York) and was involved in directing opera and theatre in 1924-1925.

In 1925, Mamoulian and American modern dancer Martha Graham together produced a short two-color film called The Flute of Krishna, featuring Eastman students. They both left the school shortly thereafter. He began his Broadway director career in October 1927 with a production of DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, which made his international fame at once for its characteristics. He directed the revival of Porgy in 1929 along with George Gershwin’s operatic treatment, Porgy and Bess (1935). He was also the first to stage such notable Broadway works as Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), and Lost in the Stars (1949).

His first feature film, Applause (1929), was one of the earliest talkies. It was a landmark film owing to Mamoulian's innovative use of camera movement and sound. These qualities were carried through to his other films released in the 1930s. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) considered the best version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale, benefited from having been made before the Production Code came into full force, the same as Queen Christina (1933), the last film that Greta Garbo made with John Gilbert.

The image above is a screeshot from a video of an interview in 1984 where Mamoulian talks about directing Greta Garbo in "Queen Christina". The first 30 seconds are in French, but Mamoulian's speaks in English thereafter. Click here to link to the video.

He directed the first three-strip Technicolor film, Becky Sharp (1935), based on William Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, as well as the 1937 musical High, Wide, and Handsome. His next two films, The Mark of Zorro (1940) and Blood and Sand (1941), starred Tyrone Power. These were remakes of silent movies that earned him wide admiration. Blood and Sand used color schemes based on the work of Spanish artists such as Diego Velázquez and El Greco. His foray into screwball comedy genre was a success: Rings on Her Fingers (1942) starred Henry Fonda and Gene Tierney.

In the early 1930s the Armenian film studio Armenfilm negotiated with him to film a movie in Soviet Armenia, which never happened. Mamoulian was going to direct the 1935 Metro Goldwyn Mayer version of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which was stopped due to Turkish pressure on the U.S. State Department.

Mamoulian was recruited in 1936 by King Vidor, co-founder of Directors Guild of America (DGA), to help unionize fellow movie directors. His lifelong allegiance to the DGA, as well as his general unwillingness to compromise, contributed to his being targeted in Hollywood’s blacklisting of the 1950s. His last completed musical film was the 1957 version of the Cole Porter musical Silk Stockings, with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. His film directing career came to an end when he was consecutively fired from two movies, Porgy and Bess (1959) and Cleopatra (1963).

He lived and created outside the Armenian milieu, but he was frequently in contact one way or another. In an event in his honor held in 1932 at the Nubarian Library of Paris, he noted: “The fact that I have not forgotten my being Armenian, despite living in a foreign environment, is very natural; the contrary would be unnatural.” He rejected all proposals to have his name changed or shortened, at a time when ethnic surnames were not so favored in America.

In the summer of 1971 Mamoulian visited Soviet Armenia, but except for a quick visit to the main tourist attractions, he did not enjoy any official reception and journalists were banned from meeting him. The reason was that he had been denounced as an enemy of the Soviet Union for having filmed an anti-Soviet movie (Silk Stockings, where the KGB spy Ninotchka did not return to the Soviet Union).

Mamoulian was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1981 and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America in 1982. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

He was not only a director, but also a theoretician of films and theater. He wrote many articles on these issues. He also wrote screenplays, shorts stories, and a version of Hamlet in contemporary English. He died on December 4, 1987 of natural causes in Woodland Hills, California, at the age of 90. The funeral services were held at the St. Mary Armenian Apostolic Church of Glendale and the Armenian director was buried at the Forest Lawn cemetery of Glendale. His wife, painter Azadia Newman, died in 1999 at the age of 97.

Birth of Arshag Fetvadjian (October 1, 1866)

Arshag Fetvadjian was one of the most versatile Armenian artists in modern times. Besides paintings, frescoes, and graphic works, he made designs for theatrical performances, dance halls, paper money, and stamps. He also worked on architectural projects and redecorated churches. He also wrote articles on issues of Armenian architecture, European painting, theater, and culture in general.

Fetvadjian was born on October 1, 1866, in the port of Trebizond. He completed his studies at the local Armenian school, and then he entered the newly opened Imperial School of Fine Arts in Constantinople (1882). He was one of its first graduates in 1887. From 1887 to 1891 he studied at the San Luca Accademia of Rome with the famous Italian painter, Cesare Maccari. In his last year of study, he participated in the national exhibition of Italian painters at the Palazzo d’Arte of Rome.

He moved to Vienna in 1891, where he worked as an independent artist for four years. In 1895 he moved to St. Petersburg, where he became a member of the Society of Russian Watercolor Painters. He was gradually accepted as the premier Armenian painter in watercolor. He participated in collective exhibitions in Russia, as well as in individual exhibitions in the Caucasus (Batum, Tilis, Pyatigors, and Baku) between 1899 and 1902.

Between 1900 and 1920, Fetvadjian traveled annually to Eastern Armenia and painted pictures of churches and castles, fortress walls and civic buildings, as well as portraits of Armenian women in traditional costume. The results of his hard work were 30 large-scale watercolors, depicting Ani and its surrounding monuments, and 1500 pencil drawings of decorations of churches and khachkars. This documentation was very important, as little had been photographed at the time, and many of those monuments do not exist anymore. The same happened with many samples of national costumes worn by Armenian women.

Fetvadjian returned to Vienna in 1906 and published 15 color postcards with pictures of Ani and 10 postcards of his most celebrated oil paintings. He showed his pictures of Ani for the first time in his individual exhibition of 1908 in Tiflis. He was commissioned to decorate the Kamoyants Surp Kevork church of Tiflis, which had been restored from 1900-1908 (it would be destroyed by the Soviet Georgian government in the 1930s), and several other churches.

He made his final visit to Ani in 1917, accompanying Russian scholar Nikolai Marr and a group of Armenian scholars. In 1918 he was in Etchmiadzin painting Armenian refugee women.

The government of the Republic of Armenia commissioned Fetvadjian to design the stamps and the banknotes of the new country. His designs used national symbols, like Ararat, a village woman, etcetera. In 1919 he was authorized to print the stamps in France and the banknotes in Great Britain. However, they reached the country in November 1920, when the Soviet regime was about to be established, and were never put into circulation.

In 1920-1921 Fetvadjian offered exhibitions of his works in Paris and London, which earned the appreciation of the French and British press. In 1922 he settled in the United States, hoping to obtain financial help to publish his works. He gave exhibitions at Columbia University, Chicago University, and Princeton University. An ad-hoc committee was formed to raise funds, however, was dissolved after a year, due to the indifference and cold treatment by the Armenian community.

Manuel Der Manuelian, a consul of the Republic of Armenia in the United States, who lived in Boston, helped Fetvadjian move to Boston, where he lived modestly for the rest of his life. He continued his participation in various exhibitions in Boston and New York. He was commissioned to carve a table and altar for St. Illuminator’s Cathedral of New York, along with an altar painting representing the Virgin and the Child that has remained there until this day.

In 1947 Fetvadjian was invited by the government of Soviet Armenia to return to Armenia. However, amid preparations, the artist passed away in Medford, Massachusetts, on October 7, 1947. His ashes, together with his paintings and archives, were taken to the homeland, where his ashes were buried in Yerevan. His paintings are displayed in the permanent exhibition of the National Gallery of Armenia, and other paintings are in various European and American museums and private collections.

Death of Catholicos of All Armenians Kevork VI (September 26, 1954)

Anti-religious policies during the first two decades of the Soviet Union would progressively bring the Armenian Church to the brink of destruction. Archbishop Kevork Chorekjian, first as locum tenens of the Catholicosate of All Armenians, and then as Catholicos, would lead the effort to revitalize the Church.

The future Catholicos was born in Nor Nakhichevan (today part of Rostov-on-the-Don) on December 2, 1868. After elementary studies at the parish school, in 1879 he entered the Kevorkian Seminary in Holy Etchmiadzin. He graduated in 1889 and was ordained a deacon in the same year. He pursued higher education at the University of Leipzig (Germany) in the fields of theology and philosophy, and also at the music conservatory (1889-1894).

Upon graduation, he returned to the homeland. He first taught music at the Kevorkian Seminary for one year (1894-1895) and then went back to his birthplace, Nor Nakhichevan, where for almost two decades he would work actively as a teacher and musician.

The breakthrough in his life occurred in 1913. At the age of 45, he was ordained archimandrite (vartabed) by Catholicos Kevork V and designated vicar of the diocese of Nor Nakhichevan. Two years later, as a member of the Committee of Fraternal Aid, he organized help for the refugees who had escaped from the Armenian Genocide, and became its chairman, as well as member of the Synod in 1916. He was ordained bishop in 1917 and designated sacristan of the Holy See.

Bishop Chorekjian was named primate of the diocese of Georgia in 1922 and held the post until 1927, when he returned to Holy Etchmiadzin and became a member of the Supreme Spiritual Council. Meanwhile, in 1925 he was elevated to the rank of archbishop.

The Soviet regime had practiced a comprehensive policy designated to reduce to a minimum the influence of the Church in general over society, and the policies carried in Soviet Armenia followed this general trend. As a result, by the 1930s most of the married and celibate priests in Armenia had renounced to the habits or had been subjected to various penalties, among other repressive measures. These policies came to a peak in 1938, when Catholicos of All Armenians Khoren I (1932-1938) died in unclear circumstances, which have been generally regarded as an assassination carried by orders of the Soviet secret police within the framework of the Stalinist purges. The first secretary of the Communist Party in Armenia, Grigor Arutinov, even wrote a letter to Joseph Stalin in 1940 asking permission to close the monastery of Holy Etchmiadzin and to turn it into a museum. Fortunately, the letter had no consequences.

Archbishop Kevork Chorekjian was one of the few high-ranking ecclesiastics who remained in Armenia. An encyclical issued by Khoren I before his death designated him as vicar of the Catholicosate. He managed the position until April 1941, when a National Representative Assembly was called to elect a Catholicos. However, the conditions were not favorable for the election (many dioceses could not send representatives due to World War II), and the gathering formally elected Archbishop Chorekjian as locum tenens of the Catholicosate.

For the next four years, the Soviet Union was involved in a life or death struggle against Nazi Germany, which also bore its impact over Armenia. The levels of repression and political pressure somehow diminished, and Archbishop Chorekjian took advantage to start working towards the reconstruction of the Armenian Church.

He organized a fundraiser in the Diaspora to finance the creation of the tank convoys “David of Sassoun” and “General Bagramian,” which would be added to the Soviet army. This public relations campaign would have its effect later, when he raised the issue of the Armenian territories usurped by Turkey in a meeting with Stalin held in April 1945.

The National Representative Assembly gathered in Etchmiadzin in June 1945 and elected 76-year-old Archbishop Kevork Chorekjian as Catholicos of All Armenians. Four months later, he addressed the government of the U.S.S.R, the U.S.A. and Great Britain, asking for the devolution of Armenian territories. From 1945-1947, claims for the return of Kars and Ardahan to Soviet Armenian would be one of the focuses of Soviet foreign policy.

Stalin also allowed some leniency to the Church, and Kevork VI used this to reopen the printing house, which in 1944 started the publication of the official monthly Etchmiadzin, which replaced the old monthly Ararat (closed in 1919). Some of the buildings of the monastery, which had been confiscated, were returned to the Holy See, as were the monasteries of Surp Hripsime, Surp Keghart, and Khor Virap. The seminary, closed since 1918, was reopened in November 1945 and its library was restored.

Despite the establishment of the Iron Curtain and the beginning of the Cold War, Kevork VI tried to enhance the links between Soviet Armenia and the Diaspora, which had been severed in the late 1930s. He had a significant role in the organization of the repatriation of 1946-1948.

The Catholicos also worked to replenish the ecclesiastical ranks, which had been decimated in the 1920s and 1930s. Fifteen new bishops were ordained during the nine years of his reign, and assigned to various dioceses which had remained without a religious head for years.

Catholicos Kevork VI passed away on September 26, 1954. He would be succeeded in 1955 by Catholicos Vazken I (1955-1994).

Death of Sayat-Nova (September 22, 1795)

For almost three centuries, the songs composed by troubadour Sayat-Nova have been among the favorites of the Armenian people. Despite being written in the dialect of Tiflis, with a mix of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, their lyrics have always spoken to the heart of the listener.

Sayat-Nova’s life is involved in a cloud of mystery. It has been reconstructed to a certain level by the work of several generations of scholars, but there are many details that are still a matter of controversy.

It has been traditionally held that Sayat-Nova was born in Tiflis, the capital of the kingdom of Georgia, in 1712, and the 250th anniversary of his birth was celebrated throughout the Armenian world with great pomp in 1962. However, poet and scholar Paruyr Sevak was the first to demonstrate in his doctoral dissertation defended in 1966 and published in 1969 that there were more than enough grounds to date the poet’s birth in 1722.

Most likely, Sayat-Nova’s ancestors were born in Cilicia, and the birthplace of his father was either Adana or Aleppo. The future poet and troubadour spent his childhood and youth in Tiflis, his birthplace, where he learned to write and read Armenian and Georgian, and he also knew the Arabic alphabet.

At the age of 12 he became an apprentice of weaving and in a short time became a very capable weaver. However, his actual love was songs and music, perhaps influenced by his parents.

Sayat-Nova perfected himself in the art of the ashugh (troubadours) until the age of 30. He learned melodies and different metrics. At the same time, he created poems, which he interpreted during popular gatherings. It is likely that he traveled through the Near East and visited Persia, India, and the Ottoman Empire. He later was acknowledged as a poet-singer and baptized with the name of Sayat-Nova (from Persian, meaning “hunter of songs”).

The monument to Sayat Nova in central Yerevan.

Sayat Nova wrote in three languages: Armenian, Georgian, and (Azerbaijani) Turkish. More than 230 of his poems have reached us, which were collected in manuscript books that he wrote by his own hand or that his son Ohan compiled and copied, in various collections of folklore, or remained in the memory of the people and were gradually written down and published.

The earliest poem is dated 1742, even though there may be earlier compositions. The last poem was the famous “The World is a Window...” («Աշխարըս մե փանջարա է...»), written in April 1759. Sayat-Nova was the first who created and sang Georgian poems using the motifs of Persian poetry. This innovation was well received and he was appointed musician in the court of King Irakli II of Kakheti (one of the Georgian kingdoms). For some ten years the poet was in the court and produced some of his best works in this period. His poems spoke of justice and nobility, condemned deceit and villainy, and social and moral flaws. His love poetry expressed the most delicate and sacred feelings with images that were unusual.

His life was not peaceful. There were conspiracies against him and he was expelled from the palace at least twice, in 1753 and 1759. The last one was the final, and his life as poet, composer, and musician ended there, at the age of 37. He would still live for more than three decades.

In 1759 Irakli II forced him to become a priest, with the name of Der Stepanos, and he was sent to the port of Enzeli (Persia), on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. He “repented” here and copied the poem Book of Lamentations, by Gregory of Narek, in 1760. In 1766 he was a priest in the small town of Kakhi, on the road from Zakatala to Shamakhi, where he copied another manuscript, a compilation of biblical fragments. Both manuscripts are kept today in the Matenadaran of Yerevan.

Sayat-Nova’s wife, Marmar, passed away in 1768 and left four small children (Hovhannes or Ohan, Melkiset, Sarah, and Mariam). In 1768 or 1769 Der Stepanos, the former Sayat-Nova, moved to Tiflis, where he served in the prelacy of the congregation of Haghbat, which had settled in the Georgian city. In 1778, when the monastery of Haghbat was rebuilt, he was designated sacristan of the church of Surp Nshan. He returned to Tiflis with the congregation later, probably in 1784.

On September 22, 1795, during the Afghan invasion of Georgia, led by Agha-Mahmad Kajar, Sayat-Nova was killed when he refused to renege his religion. He was buried in the courtyard of the church of Surp Kevork. There, by initiative of poet Hovhannes Tumanian, the memory of Sayat-Nova has been observed since 1914 every May with popular festivities.

Massacre of Baku (September 14-15, 1918)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Baku was, after Tiflis, the second Armenian city of the Caucasus. By the end of the same century, the Armenian population of the city had been practically wiped out.

One of the chapters of that ethnic cleansing was the massacre of September 1918. While the Third Ottoman Army Corps was stopped in its advance in the battles of May 1918 that allowed Armenia to become an independent state, the Second Army Corps continued its advance through the line Gharakilise-Dilijan-Ghazakh (Ijevan)-Elizavetpol (Gandzak, Ganja) towards Baku.

Azerbaijan had proclaimed its independence on May 27, 1918 with Elizavetpol as its capital. Baku, the richest city in the country with its oil fields, had been governed since April 1918 by a Soviet (council) led by Bolshevik Stepan Shahumian. The Baku Soviet collaborated with the local branch of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation to establish control over the city and its environs. While the Bolsheviks had the revolution in mind, the Armenians were primarily concerned with physical survival. However, by the beginning of summer, the Soviet found itself under increased threat by the Ottoman army, which had been enthusiastically received by the newly created Azerbaijani government, presided by M. Fatali Khan-Khoyski. Both sides clashed in June and July, but the joint Ottoman-Azerbaijani offensive could not be stopped by the forces loyal to the Baku Soviet, which, with no promise of material support from Moscow, was forced to turn to a British expeditionary force stationed in Persia under the command of Major-General Lionel C. Dunsterville. Although Shahumian had been ordered by Moscow to deny entry to the British, he was overruled by his peers in the Soviet, which formally requested help in late July. On July 31 Shahumian and the other Bolshevik members resigned from their posts and the Centro-Caspian Dictatorship assumed control of the city.

The size of the British force, however, proved to be too small to make much of an impact. In August, the Ottoman military, led by the so-called Army of Islam headed by Nuri Pasha (Ottoman War Minister Enver Pasha’s half-brother), launched a new assault against the frontline positions, which were primarily manned by Armenians, who were forced to retreat despite some initial victories. In the first week of September, a joint Ottoman-Azerbaijani force composed of 15,000 men advanced without much resistance toward Baku and reached the suburbs by September 13. Meanwhile, the Muslim population of Baku prepared to welcome the entry of the Ottoman army. The Armenian troops were too ill-prepared to halt the advance and Dunsterville refused to retain his force, which evacuated from Baku on September 14 and sailed to Enzeli, in Persia, leaving the city virtually defenseless.

A terrible panic ensued once the invaders entered Baku. The Armenians crowded the harbor in a frantic effort to escape the fate that they knew very well. Regular Ottoman troops were not allowed to enter the city for two days, so that the local irregulars (bashibozuks) would conduct the usual looting and pillaging. Despite this order, regular Ottoman troops participated alongside the irregulars and the Azeris of Baku in the plundering, and then turned their fury against the Armenian population. Calls by German officers attached to the Ottoman command staff to treat the local population with leniency were ignored.

Armenians fleeing the massacre through the Azerbaijani countryside.

On September 16, the Ottoman divisions formally entered the city in a victory parade reviewed by the Ottoman High Command. Baku would subsequently be proclaimed as the capital of the newly established Azerbaijani Republic.

According to a special commission formed by the Armenian National Council of Baku, a total of 8,988 Armenians were massacred, among which were 5,248 Armenian inhabitants, 1,500 Armenian refugees from other areas of the Caucasus, and 2,240 Armenians whose corpses were found in the streets but remained unidentified. Other estimates range up to 30,000 people.