Kuyumjian Trilogy Presentation in New Jersey on Andonian and Teotig

Dr. Anie Kalayjian, a trauma expert and psychologist who has spent much effort dealing with issues concerning the Armenian Genocide, introduced Kuyumjian to the audience. Kuyumjian is a graduate of the Yerevan State Medical Institute who continued her studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and became an assistant professor of psychiatry at the latter institution. She is also director of the Psychiatric Outpatient Department of St. Mary’s Hospital in Montreal. Her volunteer work with children after the 1988 Armenian earthquake led to her 1990 Armenian-language book Hayasdanean husher hokepoyzhi orakren [Memories of Armenia from the Diary of a Psychiatrist], which chronicled her experience working with children after the 1988 Armenian earthquake. She also is the author of a 2001 psychobiography of the composer Komitas Vartabed, titled Archeology of Madness: Komitas, Portrait of an Armenian Icon.

Kuyumjian accompanied her presentation with slides of maps and pictures of the individuals and places being discussed in order to facilitate understanding of sometimes complex series of events. She attempted to give the audience a basic understanding of the lives of Andonian and Teotig (and the latter’s wife Arshagouhi), as well as the fate of the Armenian intellectuals of Constantinople.

Kuyumjian’s interest in Komitas led her to discover 25 articles published by Aram Andonian in the newspaper Arevmudk between 1946 and 1947 in Paris about the arrest and deportation of Komitas and the other intellectuals of Constantinople in 1915. As Andonian himself was among those intellectuals, his testimony was vital. He described the beginning of the mental breakdown Komitas experienced.

Readers asked him to give a broad picture of those events, and he did. Like many Armenian periodicals, a full set of Arevmudk is not available in any one library, so Kuyumjian had to collect the articles from Beirut, Paris and Yerevan. The translation and editing of these articles turned into the volume Exile, Trauma and Death: On the Road to Chankiri with Komitas Vartabed. I can say as a historian that this is an extremely important source on the early period of the Armenian Genocide. It also makes for riveting reading, and is leavened with black humor. Many of the great names of the Ottoman Armenians are mentioned in this work (and for those unfamiliar with this period, Kuyumjian has provided basic identifying information in footnotes).

Kuyumjian pointed out in her talk that the deportation and death of the Armenian intellectuals was not only a big blow to Armenian society, but it was also a great loss to the Ottoman Empire. Many of these men had made great contributions to democracy and constitutionalism in the Empire, and were internationally renowned experts in various fields of knowledge.

In order to identify many of the Armenian intellectuals mentioned in Andonian’s work, Kuyumjian turned to a work prepared by Teotig, Memorial to the Martyred Intelligentsia, which was published in 1919. This useful and readable work gives concise biographies in a paragraph or two of 763 of the intellectuals and leaders arrested on April 24, along with their pictures. It is a valuable reference work, and includes short eyewitness accounts of the fate of the intellectuals by Piwzant Bozajian and Mikayel Shamdanjian, and several other essays. Kuyumjian published this work, which was translated by Ara Stepan Melkonian, along with a biography of Teotig himself that she wrote, as a two-part volume titled Teotig: Biography & Monument to April 11.