Tag Archive for: This Week in Armenian History

BIRTH OF MANOUG PARIKIAN

Manoug Parikian was an accomplished British Armenian violinist and violin teacher of international fame.

Parikian was born on September 15, 1920, in Mersin (Cilicia), to parents from Adana. He lived in Cyprus, where he took his first violin lessons from his paternal uncle Vahan Bedelian, a well-known musician and teacher. He moved to London in 1936, where he studied with Louis Pecsaki at the Trinity College of Music (1936-1939).

He made his debut as a concerto soloist in 1947 in Liverpool and in 1949 at the Royal Albert Hall, London. He was concert master of several orchestras: the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra (1947-1948), London Philharmonia Orchestra (1949-1957), The English Opera Group Orchestra (1949-1951),

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DEATH OF CYRUS HAMLIN

Cyrus Hamlin was a prominent American Congregational missionary and co-founder of Robert College in Constantinople.

Hamlin was born in Waterford, Maine, on January 8, 1811. He belonged to a prominent nineteenth-century family in the state. At sixteen, he entered an apprenticeship as a silversmith and jeweler in Portland, Maine, before deciding to enter the ministry. He first attended Bridgton Academy before heading to college. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1834 and from Bangor Theological Seminary in 1837.

Hamlin married Henrietta Jackson in 1838 and they left the United States in the same year for the Ottoman Empire as a missionary under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He helped found Bebek Seminary in 1840 as part of his outreach to Armenians and directed it until 1860.

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BIRTH OF PAUL GARABEDIAN

Paul Garabedian was an Armenian American mathematician whose computer computations helped lead to fuel–efficient wings for modern jetliners.

He was born in Cincinnati on August 2, 1927. He was home-schooled by his parents, who both held Harvard graduate degrees. Harvard rejected him when he applied for college in 1943, and he attended Brown University instead. After graduation (1946), he went to Harvard for his master’s (1947) and doctoral studies and completed his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1948 at the age of 21.

After working for seven years at the University of California, Berkeley (1949-1956), and three years at Stanford University (1956-1959), Garabedian joined New York University and remained there for the next 51 years in the division of computational fluid dynamics of the university’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, becoming its director in 1978. He supervised 27 dissertations from 1953 to 1997. He married and had two daughters.

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DEATH OF EDUARD DANIELIAN

A prolific historian, Eduard Danielian had an important contribution to the study of Armenian ancient and medieval history.

Danielian was born on February 18, 1944, in Yerevan. He graduated from the Faculty of Geography of Yerevan State University (1961-1966) and the English section of the Institute (now University) of Foreign Languages Valery Briusov (1966-1972). After finishing the course at the Ph.D. program of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences, in 1972 he defended his dissertation on “The Reflection of Ancient Cosmological Views in Anania Shirakatsi’s Cosmology and Atlas.” He earned a second doctorate in 1988 with the subject “Armeno-Byzantine Political Relations in the Twilight of Sassanid Persia and the Early Period of the Arab Caliphate.”

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DEATH OF STEPANOS MALKHASIANTS

Along with Hrachia Ajarian and Manuk Abeghian, Stepanos Malkhasiants was a key name in Armenian philology of the first half of the twentieth century.

He was born in Akhaltskha (Akhaltsikh), Javakhk, nowadays in Georgia, on November 7, 1859. He received his primary education at the Karapetian parochial school in Akhaltskha and then the local Russian gymnasium. From 1874 to 1878 he attended the Gevorgian Seminary in Vagharshapat. Malkhasiants was later admitted to the department of Oriental Studies at St. Petersburg State University and graduated in 1889 with an emphasis in Armenian, Sanskrit, and Georgian Studies and a first doctorate in philology.

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DEATH OF HEINRICH GELZER

German historian and philologist Heinrich Gelzer’s wide interest in ancient history led him to learn Armenian and deal with the intricacies of Armenian ancient history.

He was the son of well-known Swiss historian Johann Heinrich Gelzer (1813-1889). He was born on July 1, 1847, in Berlin. He taught classical philology and ancient history at the Basel Institute and the universities of Heidelberg and Jena, where he became professor in 1878.

He studied the works of various ancient historians (Sextus Julius Africanus, Eusebius of Caesarea, George of Cyprus, and others), as well as the history of Byzantium. His main works of Armenian Studies were translated into Armenian: Pavstos Buzand and the Beginnings of the Armenian Church (1896),…

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DEATH OF KAREN JEPPE

Karen Jeppe was the guardian angel of Armenian orphans. Her memory is still alive, especially through the high school that bears her name in Aleppo, which constitutes a tribute to her sacrifice for the love of the Armenian people.

Karen Jeppe was born on July 1, 1876, in the town of Gylling (Denmark). She received her elementary education in the local school and, after learning German in Germany, she received her high school education at a boarding school in Copenhagen.

Learning about the Hamidian massacres awakened in her the desire to go to the assistance of the Armenians. In 1903, against her father’s will, she departed to Urfa to join the German Mission there.

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BIRTH OF ANTHONY KRAFFT-BONNARD

Pastor Krafft-Bonnard was among the first to delve into aid for Armenia following the news about the Hamidian massacres in 1895-1896. In fall 1896, the different committees organized in many Swiss cantons united to form the Conference of Swiss Committees of Aid to Armenians, presided by Prof. Georges Godet, and send assistance to be distributed in place by American missionaries. In the same meeting, another initiative saw the light, which would last about half a century: to move Armenian orphans to Switzerland, where they would be received by families who would take care of the financial and educational burden. Krafft-Bonnard, who chaired the committee in charge, received the first orphan in 1897.

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MAY 28, A GLORIOUS ANNIVERSARY

Almost nine centuries after the fall of the Bakradouni Kingdom in Armenia and six centuries after the collapse of the Armenian Kingdom in Cilicia, the birth of the Republic of Armenia was a miracle. The dimmest moment in our history became the brightest, when the Armenian nation, like the mythological phoenix, rose renewed from its ashes and established a state on the plains of Mount Ararat. With Western Armenia obliterated by the Armenian Genocide, Eastern Armenia forged its own destiny, ready to participate as a sovereign member in the family of nations, leading the Armenian people to new horizons.

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DEATH OF KEVORK CHAVOUSH

There were names that rose to legendary proportions at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, when Turkish and Kurdish marauding of Armenian peasantry was met with armed resistance by fedayees (freedom fighters). Kevork Chavoush was among the most prominent figures leading that struggle.

He was born Kevork Atamian in 1870, in the village of Megtink, district of Psanats (Sasoun). In 1886 his family sent him to the school of the monastery of the Holy Apostles (Arakelots) in Moush. At school, he heard about Arabo (Arakel Mkhitarian, 1863-1893), one of the founders of the fedayee movement. He decided to join the movement in 1888. He left for Aleppo, where he spent two years working to buy a gun. In 1890 he returned to Sasoun. …

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