Paruyr Ghazarian was born in the small village of Chanakhchi (now Zangakatun), in the district of Ararat, in Armenia. His parents were humble villagers. He attended the local school and graduated with honors in 1940. He had written his first poetry at the age of thirteen…
The National Academic Theater of Armenia was founded in Yerevan in 1921. It opened its doors on January 25, 1922 with the performance of Gabriel Sundukian’s (1825-1912) classic play “Pepo.” Until 1938 it functioned at the worker’s club named after Stepan Shahumian (in the place of today’s Marriott-Armenia Hotel).
Nubar Nubarian, the first Prime Minister of the modern day Egypt, was born in Smyrna (Izmir) in 1825. He was the son of an Armenian merchant, Mgrdich Nubarian. His mother was a relative of Boghos Bey Yusufian, an influential minister of Muhammad Ali, Viceroy of Egypt (1805-1849) and the founder of the modern Egyptian state.
Prolific filmmaker Henri Verneuil was one of the well-known names in French cinema for forty years, and closed his cinematographic career with two autobiographic films that narrated the Armenian experience…
Jim Torosian was the chief architect of Yerevan in the 1970s and one of the creators of its contemporary image.
He was born in the capital of Armenia on April 18, 1926.
Hamasdegh was a leading Armenian-American writer and became a highly regarded name in the Armenian literature of the Diaspora.He was born Hampartsoum Gelenian in the village of Perchenj, in the region of Kharpert, on November 26, 1895.
Nalbandian was born on November 14, 1829, in Nor Nakhichevan, the town close to Rostov-on-Don founded in the late eighteenth century by Armenian emigrants from Crimea, in the family of a craftsman. He studied in his hometown at the school of Gabriel Patkanian, and for a while he was classmate of his son, the future poet Rafael Patkanian (Kamar Katipa).
Everyone has seen, in person or in picture, Yervant Kochar’s iconic statue of David of Sassoun in front of the train station of Yerevan. Fewer people are aware that a second, equestrian statue of the hero of the Armenian epic poem Saroyan stands in front of the courthouse in Fresno, California.
