DEATH OF HOVHANNES MIRZA-VANANDETSI

Hovhannes Mirza-Vanandetsi was one of the exponents of Armenian classicism in the nineteenth century.

Mirza-Vanandetsi, whose actual name was Amirzade Mirzayan, was born in Van in 1772. He became an orphan at the age of four and was placed in the care of the brotherhood of the monastery of the island of Gduts, where he grew up and received his early education. He was a gifted student and became and deacon. At the age of twenty, he moved to Constantinople to further his education. He studied at the Tbradun School, under the sponsorship of the Armenian Patriarchate, where he studied grammar, rhetoric, and logic. He graduated in 1798 and the following year he was appointed teacher at the recently opened Mesrobian School of Smyrna, where he taught until 1816. He was ordained a married priest in 1817 and remained in Smyrna for the rest of his life. He passed away on February 3, 1841, after a long illness.

Vanandetsi, who wrote exclusively in Classical Armenian, composed his first work, Eulogy on the Holy Cross of Christ, in 1816 (posthumously published in 1853). It extolled the role played by Christianity in the life of the Armenian people, including the history of the Holy Cross of Varak. He was celebrated for his poetry, and compensated his lack of artistic skills with his rich imagination and mastery of words. His best known works are epic poems derived from themes of Armenian history that aimed at reviving patriotism and national pride: Scene of Exploits by Hayk, Aram, and Ara (1829, also posthumously published in 1856); Sun of Armenia (1836), based on the account of Agatangeghos about Armenia’s conversion to Christianity, and Golden Age of Armenia (1841), a poem of 5,500 lines published months after his death.

He is well–known by a poem, To Armenia, better known by its first line, Armenia, Land of Paradise, which was musicalized by Gomidas Vartabed.