Lawmakers from the Nagorno Karabagh Regional Council and the Shahumian Regional Council convened a meeting on September 2, 1991, and declared the Nagorno-Karabagh Republic with its border encompassing those of the Nagorno Karabagh Autonomous Region…
Unlike the mastermind of the Armenian Genocide, Talaat, Ismail Enver Pasha was a military officer, born in Constantinople on November 22, 1881. He studied in different military schools and graduated in 1903 with distinction. In 1906 he was sent to the Third Army, stationed in Salonica. He became a member of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) during his service.
The Nemesis Operation, approved by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation in its 9th World Assembly, held in Yerevan in September-October 1919, had a long list of Turkish leaders responsible for the Armenian Genocide among its targets. One of them was Ahmed Jemal, minister of Marine of the Ottoman Empire and member of the leading triumvirate of the Committee of Union and Progress (Ittihad), together with Talaat, minister of Interior, and Enver, minister of War.
A plan to massacre the Armenians of the provinces of Nukhi, Aresh, Shamakh, and Baku was prepared at a secret meeting of the government of Azerbaijan and the leaders of the ruling right-wing Musavat Party. Before the massacres, a secret order sent by Behbut Khan Jivanshir, Azerbaijani Interior Minister, to the mayors of Nukhi, Shamakh, and Baku, instructed: “It is necessary to exterminate the Armenians to achieve our goals crossing over their corpses. Do not spare anyone and execute faithfully the orders given to you.”
Forty-four years after his death, Aram Khachaturian remains the most widely known Armenian classical composer of all times. His “Sabre Dance,” the electrifying dance of the final act of the ballet “Gayane,” made him known on a popular level worldwide.
Tro (Trasdamad Ganayan) was a freedom fighter, a military leader of the first Republic of Armenia, and a political activist in the Diaspora. He was born in the town of Igdir, in the province of Surmalu (Eastern Armenia, then part of the Russian Empire).
Sartarabad, located 25 miles to the west of Yerevan, became the last Armenian stance against the advance of the invading Third Ottoman Army in May 1918. A defeat would not only open the door for their penetration to the rest of Eastern Armenia, but also the follow-up to the genocide of 1915-1916.
The last Prime Minister of the first Republic of Armenia, Simon Vratsian, was born in 1882, in the village of Medz Sala, near Nakhichevan-on-the-Don (today Rostov-on Don, in the northern Caucasus).
Shushi had historically been the capital of Karabagh and the third most important Armenian cultural center in the Southern Caucasus (after Tiflis and Baku) until 1920, when the pogrom executed by Azerbaijani forces ended in the destruction of the Armenian quarters and the extermination of the Armenian population of the city.
Poet Hovhannes Shiraz, one of the most popular names in Armenia and the Diaspora during Soviet times, was born in Alexandropol (later Leninakan, now Gumri), in 1915. His birth name was Onnig Garabedian. At the age of five, he lost his father, who was killed in the Turkish invasion of Armenia that followed the Armenian-Turkish war of 1920.
