Death of Maghakia Ormanian (November 19, 1918)

Archbishop Maghakia Ormanian was a remarkable figure of the Armenian Church in turbulent times at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.

Boghos Ormanian was born on February 23, 1841 in Constantinople. After learning the first letters, in 1851 he was sent to Rome, where he pursued studies at the convent of St. Gregory, belonging to the Antonine Congregation, and then at the Vatican. He returned to Constantinople in 1866 and became secretary of the Antonine Congregation, while a year later he was designated principal of the Antonine School in Rome. In 1868 he obtained a master degree in philosophy, theology, and Church law, and became a member of the Theological Academy of Rome, as well as teacher of Armenian at the College of the Propaganda Fide.

Meanwhile, an acute conflict had started within the Armenian Catholic community as a result of the bulla Reversurus, promulgated by Pope Pius IX in 1867, which made dramatic changes in the traditions with which Armenians were familiar. The conflict was around the figure of Andon Hassoun, Armenian Catholic archbishop-primate of Constantinople, who was consecrated Armenian Catholic Patriarch of Cilicia by the Pope in 1867, with residence in Constantinople.

Ormanian took position with the anti-Hassoun camp, and returned to Constantinople in 1870, where he published numerous commentaries in French and Armenians newspapers against the Vatican policy, as well as several books in Italian and French, which in 1874 were included in the Index (the catalog of forbidden books) of the Vatican.

In 1876 Ormanian decided to sever his links with the Catholic Church and renounce Catholicism, and the following year he applied to Archbishop Nerses Varjabedian, Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, asking to return to the Armenian Apostolic Church. In 1879 he received the grade of archimandrite superior (dzayrakooyn vartabed)of the Armenian Apostolic Church from the Patriarch in a ceremony at the cathedral of Kum-Kapu, in Constantinople.

After a short stint as preacher at the church of St. Gregory the Illuminator in the neighborhood of Galatia, in 1880 he was designated prelate of the diocese of Garin (Erzerum) and had an important role in the opening of the Sanasarian School of Erzerum in 1881. He also established links with the leaders of the secret organization “Defenders of the Fatherland,” founded in the same year. After his consecration as bishop by Catholicos of All Armenians Magar I in 1886, a year later he left the diocese of Garin and was invited to Holy Echmiadzin as lecturer of Theology at the Kevorkian Seminary. Among his students were future luminaries of the Armenian Church and culture, such as Gomidas Vartabed, Karekin I Hovsepiants, Karapet Ter-Mkrtichian, Yervant Ter-Minasian, and others. His teaching made an impact in the seminary.

His liberal views attracted the attention of the Russian authorities and, under the pretext of not being a Russian citizen, he was expelled from the Russian Empire in 1889. He returned to Constantinople and was named abbot of the monastery of Armash and director of the newly founded seminary.

On November 19, 1896 Ormanian, already an archbishop, was elected Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople. He succeeded Abp. Mateos Izmirlian (1894-1896), labeled the “Iron Patriarch” for his energetic protests against the Armenian massacres of 1894-1896. For this reason, he has been forced to resign by the Turkish authorities, which had exiled him to Egypt.

Ormanian adopted a conciliatory attitude towards the “Red Sultan” Abdul Hamid II, in order to avoid further massacres and create a more or less tolerable situation in the years of tyranny. His conservative policies alienated part of the Armenian constituency, and shortly after the Ottoman Revolution of 1908, a huge Armenian demonstration invaded the offices of the Armenian Patriarchate on July 16, 1908 and declared Ormanian’s dismissal from his position. The former Patriarch, in a book published in 1910, rebutted charges that he had been unreceptive to national problems and a knee-jerk to the Sultan, as well as a dictator in the management of community issues. The National Representative Assembly vindicated the former Patriarch in its session of January 3, 1913. 

Ormanian was elected delegate of the Church convention and member of the Religious Council in 1913, as well as prelate of the diocese of Egypt, but he rejected this position. He took various positions in the monastery of St. James, in Jerusalem, from 1914-1917, and also taught at the seminary. He returned to Constantinople in 1918 and passed away on November 19, on the twenty-second anniversary of his election as Patriarch.

Archbishop Maghakia Ormanian was, along with his long administrative and teaching career in the Church, an accomplished scholar. He was the author of the monumental Azkabadoom(National History, 1910-1911 and 1927), a three-volume history of the Armenian nation based on the history of the Armenian Church, and The Armenian Church (1910, in French; 1911, in English, also translated into Armenian), a fundamental text on the doctrine, history, and administrative situation of the Armenian Apostolic Church on the eve of the Armenian Genocide, among many other works.

Birth of Michael Arlen (November 16, 1895)

Michael Arlen was one of the stars of English literature in the 1920s, but he was also a controversial name within the Armenian diaspora. His position regarding Armenian reality was frequently contrasted with that of another writer across the pond, who would shine in the 1930s: William Saroyan.

He was born Dikran Kouyoumdjian on November 16, 1895 in Rustchuk (Bulgaria), now Ruse. He was the youngest child of five to an Armenian merchant family that had initially settled in Plovdiv in 1892, where his father had established a successful import business. The family moved again, this time to England, in 1901, and settled in the seaside town of Southport.

Young Dikran attended Malvern College, and in 1913 enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, as a medical student. However, both he and his family intended that he would go to Oxford. In his first book, The London Venture, Arlen wrote: “I, up at Edinburgh, was on the high road to general fecklessness. I only stayed there a few months; jumbled months of elementary medicine, political economy, metaphysics, theosophy--I once handed round programs at an Annie Besant lecture at the Usher Hall--and beer, lots of beer. And then, one night, I emptied my last mug, and with another side-glance at Oxford, came down to London; 'to take up a literary career' my biographer will no doubt write of me.”

His literary career actually started in 1916. He contributed regularly under his birth name to the Armenian monthly Ararat, published in London between 1913 and 1919, where he wrote essays and book reviews about Armenian issues. He also published essays and literary pieces in the British weekly The New Age. He assembled some personal essays from the latter and published it as The London Venture in 1920 with the pen name Michael Arlen, which he adopted as his legal name when he naturalized as a British citizen in 1922.

After this book, he worked on collections of short stories, including The Romantic Lady (1921), Piracy: A Romantic Chronicle of These Days (1922), and These Charming People (1923). They culminated into the book that would launch Arlen's fame and fortune in the 1920s: The Green Hat (1924). This novel narrates the short life and violent death of femme fatale and dashing widow Iris Storm, owner of the hat of the title and a yellow Hispano Suiza car. Arlen became almost instantly famous, rich, and incessantly in the spotlight. He frequently traveled to the United States and worked on plays and films. The Green Hat was adapted into Broadway and London’s West End plays, and a silent Hollywood film starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in 1928. The novel was considered provocative in the United States; the movie was therefore dubbed A Woman of Affairs. It was adapted again in 1934 for a sound movie, Outcast Lady, with Constance Bennett and Herbert Marshall in the main roles.

Arlen published Young Men in Love (1927), but it received mixed reviews, the same as the next books: Lily Christine (1928), Babes in the Wood (1929), and Men Dislike Women (1931). He moved to Cannes (France), where he married Greek Countess Atalanta Mercati. They had two children, Michael John (1930), the author of the celebrated memoir Passage to Ararat, and Venetia Arlen (1933).

His immaculate manners invariably impressed everyone. He was always impeccably dressed and groomed, and drove around London in a fashionable yellow Rolls Royce, engaging in all kinds of luxurious activities. His success was viewed by some with envy, mixed with latent suspicion for foreigners. Another popular author of the time, Sydney Horler, is said to have called Arlen “the only Armenian who never tried to sell me a carpet.”

Arlen made occasional references to Armenians (he gave a speech in 1925 to the Armenian Cultural Foundation in New York) in the 1920s, but run in trouble after an essay published in Babes in the Wood, “Confessions of a Naturalized Englishman.” Many pieces published in the Armenian press criticized his seemingly anti-Armenian stance.

He would never be able to make a comeback into the literary fame that The Green Hat had brought to him. He ventured into science fiction with Man’s Mortality (1933) and into gothic horror with Hell! Said the Duchess: A Bed-Time Story (1934), and briefly returned to his earlier romantic style in his final collection of short stories, The Crooked Coronet (1939), but did not have much success.

His final novel, The Flying Dutchman (1939), was released coincidentally with the outbreak of World War II. He returned to England to contribute to the war effort. He was appointed as an information officer for Civil Defense in 1940, but when his loyalty to England was questioned in 1941, he resigned and returned to America. He moved to New York in 1945, but he suffered from writer’s block for the rest of his life. He died of lung cancer on June 23, 1956 in New York.

Birth of Maria Jacobsen (November 6, 1882)

Maria Jacobsen was a key witness of the Armenian Genocide. She belonged to a group of missionaries of different nationalities who had been active since the years before in various areas of Armenian population and continued their work for years, helping victims and survivors with their humanitarian efforts.

Maria Jacobsen in 1910

Jacobsen was born in Denmark, in the town of Siim, near Ry, on November 6, 1882. She lived in Horsens with her parents. She learned about the Hamidian massacres of 1894-1896 through the Danish media. Feminist activist Jessie Penn-Lewis arrived in Denmark from England in 1898 and helped form the Women’s Missionary Workers (Kvindelige Missions Arbejdere, K.M.A.) two years later. Young Maria soon partook in the efforts to support and provide relief to orphans in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In 1907, at the age of twenty-five, she departed to Constantinople with American missionaries, and then left for Kharpert, where she worked at the Armenian hospital. She also developed charitable activities in Malatia, Aintab, and other cities.

After a two-years sojourn in Denmark from 1912-1914 with a charity mission, she returned to Kharpert on the eve of 1915 and became a witness of the Turkish atrocities and the deportation of the Armenians.

Maria Jacobsen kept a diary in Danish from 1907-1919, which became a valuable source to document the day-to-day unfolding of the Turkish anti-Armenian policy. In a diary entry on June 26, 1915 regarding the deportations, she stated: “It is quite obvious that the purpose of their departure is the extermination of the Armenian people.” She added: “Conditions now are completely different from what they were during the massacres of 20 years ago. What could be done then is impossible now. The Turks know very well about the war raging in Europe, and that the Christian nations are too busy to take care of Armenians, so they take advantage of the times to destroy their ‘enemies.’”

Jacobsen adopted three children during this period. The first, Hansa, had fled the Bedouin family to which she had been sold, and was hiding in a tree until she became unconscious from sickness and fell. A Turk police officer and Jacobsen found her, and the Danish missionary chose to adopt her on the spot. The second child was Beatrice, and the third was Lilly, who she had found on the side of the road.

In 1919 Maria Jacobson left the Ottoman Empire after contracting typhus from the orphans. She first went to Denmark and then to the United States, where she gave a series of lectures and speeches on the plight of the Armenian people, and the massacres that they had undergone, and raised money for the orphans.

The Kemalist government prohibited the activities of all foreign missionaries, and in 1922, Jacobsen went to Beirut, where she continued to gather and care for the orphans. In July 1922, after moving to Saida, she helped establish an orphanage which sheltered 208 Armenian orphans. The Women’s Missionary Workers (K.M.A.) acquired in 1928 an orphanage previously owned by the Near East Relief, located in Jbeil, where Jacobsen moved with her orphans and would be known as Bird’s Nest (Terchnots Pooyn, in Armenian). She would be known to the orphans as “Mama."

Jacobsen was also fluent in Armenian, and often read the Bible to the orphans in their mother language. She married an Armenian dentist. She became the first woman to receive the Gold Medal Award of the Kingdom of Denmark in 1950 for her humanitarian work. Four years later, on December 14, 1954, she was awarded the Gold Medal of Honor by the government of Lebanon on her 50th jubilee celebration for her service and dedication to the Armenian community.

Maria Jacobsen passed away on 6 April 1960 and, according to her will, was buried in the courtyard of Birds' Nest. Part of her archives were deposited in the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in 2010. Her diary was first published in a bilingual Danish-Armenian edition in 1979 by Archbishop Nerses Pakhdigian and Mihran Simonian, and years later, an English translation was published by the Gomidas Institute.

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.