Father Harutyun Yerznkyan, abbot of the renowned Haghpat monastery, had four sons. Here the priest stands with his family to be photographed. Here is the priest’s house, his village, his monastery.
And here is Metekhi prison.
The monastery is for prayer, the house for living, the village the dwelling place of our ancestors and ourselves. What is Metekhi prison for? It is for imprisoning the priest’s four sons and Father Harutyun Yerznkyan himself.
The priest had four sons and taught them: “Ayb, ben, gim, da, yech, za, e, yt, to… Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name… This is no life we are living… Thy kingdom come… It cannot go on like this…” And the priest, standing so harmoniously with his family for the photograph, broke away to lead the celebrated Haghpat uprising of 1904. From there, to Metekhi. That was what beautiful Metekhi prison was for. In the investigators’ room, the accused father compared the world intended by the Lord God with the real world of the landowners Zarr, Baratov and Abdulashvili, and saw that it was not his believers’ world.
Earlier, in 1888, nine-year-old Aramayis had been sent to the Nersisian School to study Armenian, Russian, arithmetic, history, geography, natural science and theology; to listen with rapture or doubt that we Armenians had been one nation, had powerful kingdoms and kings, and now were only Turkish vilayets and one outlying Russian province, wishing to be a powerful, independent, great Armenia once again, from sea to sea. Perhaps? Eh? How, with what, through whom? Who would help us, who wanted us powerful, why did they want it, why would they?
Then their circle of friends, the Rainbow group, said a resolute “no” to that romanticism and those romantics who wished to summon our ancient cavalry’s strength against the new iron powers. For the moment it only said “no”, declaring that Rainbow had a struggle, a struggle of principle, but not the spear-fighting proposed by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Dashnaktsutyun.
Then the paths of study took the group’s members to different countries and cities. Stepan Shahumyan appeared in Riga… Aramayis Yerznkyan in Geneva, at the University of Geneva and in the ranks of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. It was 1899. Yes, we have a struggle, a great struggle, but we will not bring the Armenians out against the Turkish pack. We will forge united ranks of Armenian, Russian, Georgian, Turkish, world proletarians, draw them together and lead them in an assault on the old world. Long live the all-saving International; workers of all countries, unite!
The Armenian Social Democratic Union, founded in 1902—Yerznkyan, Shahumyan, Knunyants, Zurabyan, Khanoyan, Khumaryan, Shahverdyan, Dashtoyan—and its newspapers Proletariat, Spark, New Word and Current embraced the principle of proletarian internationalism once and for all. The call “Workers of all countries, unite!” had indeed been forged in Europe, but seemingly especially for the Caucasus, where economic struggle, by an astonishing sleight of hand, became conflict between peoples.
Everyone sought a way out. The starting point was one, the paths different, and often travelling companions from that same starting point met at distant crossroads as strangers and enemies.
The Armenian Social Democratic Union was powerless to prevent the bloody Armenian-Tatar clashes, but it could mitigate them and made particular efforts to sheath the drawn, often already bloodied swords. Aramayis Yerznkyan stood together with his like-minded Azerbaijani comrades, with Tumanyan, Shirvanzade and our other great figures. Their mission crossed the purposes of certain unknown people. The conspirators’ bullets did not find Aramayis Yerznkyan, but found his internationalist brother.
Tall, with a Socratic forehead, cultured and intelligent, Yerznkyan, moving from position to position, often flew not his beautiful internationalist flag but his personal virtue.
Study in Geneva meant learning as much in revolutionary theory as in the sciences. Theory was theory, but life would later stand like a wall before many, far more because of their lack of breadth, their supposedly principled narrow-mindedness. Aramayis Yerznkyan could lower crossed swords, join the unjoinable, draw opposite poles together. That quality was more than necessary in the most extraordinary moments of Armenian history in his time.
He took the unity of yesterday’s hostile forces to the party congress in London…
In 1912, Metekhi prison, perhaps the cell in which Father Harutyun Yerznkyan had been confined a few years earlier. Fortune smiled: the prison was full, there was not a cell for each political prisoner, and two notable men were shut in the same box, the Social Democrat Aramayis Yerznkyan and the Iskra supporter Suren Spandaryan. They spent several months together and grew close. Deprived of the chance to fight for their chief purpose, they began publishing a handwritten satirical paper against the governor and guards. Every issue became a celebration for the prisoners, and a regular pastime for these two distinguished men. But founding the newspaper Struggle in 1916 was no pastime: it was a serious continuation of their great struggle of principle, for which Aramayis Yerznkyan again went to prison. The February bourgeois-democratic revolution freed him.
Lenin and Plekhanov highly valued the answers Aramayis Yerznkyan and his comrades proposed to the national question. They had resolved and completed that question in theory, the Armenian national question too. The workers’ and peasants’ revolution would resolve it in practice. Yet the extermination of the Armenians as a people in Western Armenia and their partial extermination in Eastern Armenia, that unprecedented genocide, destroyed the very problem of resolving the Armenian question. With that destroyed problem disappeared all the solutions, so intelligent, so reasonable, often mad, often senseless, non-Marxist and Marxist alike. Twelve thousand square versts of land remained, and seven thousand orphans on it. The enemy was near and definite, the friend distant and uncertain. Armenian general and diplomat, poet and theorist went mad. Forced into independence, separated from Russia, Dashnaktsutyun finally faced its bitter enemy. Though it had no other way out, it did not hurry to take the friend’s extended hand. This concerns the refusal to receive Legrand’s delegation, which had come from Moscow to Transcaucasia over Armenia. Since they want negotiations, Legrand should make the first visit, not I, Tigran Bekzadyan. Since they are in difficulty, they should make the first visit and show respect to me, Legrand. Both were strictly principled, did not hurry to meet and apparently respected each other greatly for such principle. Meanwhile, day by day, an ancient people was disappearing beneath their feet.
Aramayis Yerznkyan’s position was laughable: he hurried from Legrand to Bekzadyan, from Bekzadyan to Legrand, again and again, without thinking of his own authority or, especially, his principles. At last he brought them together at his own place, in a zone others called neutral and he considered deeply principled, and guided negotiations along the only course advantageous to that ancient people. Such was Yerznkyan: “unprincipled” in details, principled in the main questions. Precisely that “lack of principle” enabled him to accomplish hundreds of organisational tasks, save comrades from arrest and bring off the difficult publication of new newspapers.
…Passions ran high. A member of the Transcaucasian Sejm and government, minister of labour, a member of the Armenian National Council, Aramayis Yerznkyan was invited neither into the First Republic of Armenia’s mainly Dashnak government nor into Soviet Armenia’s first governing body, the Revolutionary Committee. Later, when the country needed figures who, in Hovhannes Tumanyan’s words, could bear, forgive, endure and see good in bad, the attitude changed.
His immense organisational energy and personal charm were indispensable to Armenia’s rebirth. Here we see him in Alexander Myasnikyan’s government as People’s Commissar for Agriculture.
— On the platform at Armenian workers’ first May Day parade after Sovietisation;
— Leading commissions to address the consequences of the Leninakan and Zangezur earthquakes;
— As chairman of the republican committee for party education, directly carrying out the cultural revolution;
— Editing Soviet Armenia’s first satirical journal, Red Mosquito;
— In the halls of Armenia’s first agricultural congress;
— After Tumanyan’s death, as chairman of the Committee for Aid to Armenia.
Aramayis Yerznkyan was the first statesman, a member of government, to travel abroad in 1924, to France, representing his homeland, Soviet Armenia.
In the newspaper, a friendly caricature:
A commissar,
A builder
Of things not made by hands,
A great tiller of soil,
If you like,
An agronomist,
A stockbreeder,
A forest keeper.
He brings forth water,
Plants a garden,
Village and city
He builds.
A laughing face,
A smiling face,
A teller of fables,
An eloquent speaker,
More gifted than
Aesop.
The text’s author is Yeghishe Charents.
“By office he directed the work of Armenia’s People’s Commissariat and Council of People’s Commissars,” a contemporary testifies, “but we writers and artists regarded Aramayis Yerznkyan as a kind of ‘second commissar for education’.”
The second education commissar, Aramayis Yerznkyan, and the first, Askanaz Mravyan, held a meeting of artists of the three Transcaucasian peoples in Yerevan, then posed for a photograph. Here are Isahakyan, Demirchyan, Saryan, Romanos Melikyan, Titsian Tabidze, Huseyn Javid, Zoryan, Shirvanzade, Terlemezyan… A good journey to this demonstration of artistic brotherhood!
The personal charm of “our immeasurably beloved Aramayis Yerznkyan”, in Leo’s words, was boundless. No wonder the brightest figures of his age were drawn to him: Fridtjof Nansen, Henri Barbusse, Vasily Kamensky, Nikolai Koltsov, Titsian Tabidze, Grigol Robakidze, Paolo Iashvili, Semyon Gekht, Eugene Lanceray… An incomplete list of his close friends of other nationalities. It is noteworthy that the celebrated Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze’s The Steppe Highway names four figures embodying Armenia: Yerznkyan, Isahakyan, Saryan, Charents.
To some discernible extent Aramayis Yerznkyan is a co-author of Fridtjof Nansen’s A People Deceived. The book concerns the great genocide and the Armenian people, and was written after that great friend of the Armenians visited Soviet Armenia in 1925. In 1928 the celebrated Norwegian writes: “The role of Aramayis Yerznkyan, one of the Armenian people’s most eminent leaders and undoubtedly the most brilliant, was immense in the effectiveness of our League of Nations commission’s work. To this day we remain under the spell of that majestic figure, with his broad-minded thought, rare capacity for work and exceptional courtesy.”
“In 1935,” a contemporary testifies, “when I was in Paris speaking with Henri Barbusse, after a number of questions he said:
— How is People’s Commissar Aramayis Yerznkyan? He is very like King Nebuchadnezzar. I liked him very much. Armenia in reconstruction needs state leaders like him.”
He is the Transcaucasian Federation’s People’s Commissar for Agriculture;
He is chairman of the government commission on repatriation;
He, the first deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and chairman of Yerevan’s City Council, is to some discernible extent co-author of Alexander Tamanyan’s People’s House and almost the chief architect of the city of Yerevan being built.
“There are people who think the proletarian style in construction will be the same from Arkhangelsk to the Sahara. They are nihilists or petty-bourgeois cosmopolitans. The style determined by the process of production is bound to its inner substance and bears the stamp of the corresponding class, while incorporating climatic conditions, geographical position, building materials and those nuances connected with the conceptions of the working people who create material values in a given region. It is precisely from here that our demand for ‘national form’ arises,” writes and insists Yerznkyan the architectural theorist, while Yerznkyan the City Council chairman gives orders and builds.
“Yerevan could, of course, have looked different, and quite possibly less distinctive. But does the unique architecture of today’s Yerevan not symbolise the creative cooperation of the creator, Tamanyan, and the leader, Yerznkyan?” Martiros Saryan.
“Aramayis Yerznkyan. A figure who had become a legend in his lifetime. That vivid, distinctive son of his homeland, his whole being suffused with the highest compassion for the people, became a historical necessity for a reborn Armenia.” Avetik Isahakyan.
His bright life was tragically cut short in its fifty-eighth year, in 1937. He too passed on, as his friend Hovhannes Tumanyan might have said. The Armenian people remained, the city of Yerevan and our gratitude to Aramayis Yerznkyan, eldest of the four sons of Haghpat monastery’s rebellious abbot Harutyun: commissar, editor, publicist, diplomat, builder, energetic man of encyclopaedic knowledge.
We do not know whether, in Haghpat monastery or when joining the pupils’ Rainbow society, he swore an oath—schoolchildren like oaths, after all. Whether he swore to take responsibility for the fate of his torn people and their torn land, swore that whatever happened and however it happened, this was his people… We do not know, but his life greatly resembles that of a man who began with an oath, worked and lived by it.
It is customary to say that artists become immortal in their works. What of social and political figures? With equal right the friend of Saryan, Charents and Tumanyan, the great Aramayis Yerznkyan, is present in their works, their equal co-author, the founder of our life today.