Daniel Varujan

Daniel Varoujan (Armenian: Դանիել Վարուժան), born Daniel Chbukkiarian in 1884 in the village of Prknig near Sivas (Sebastia) in the Ottoman Empire, was one of the foremost Armenian poets of the early twentieth century. He received his early schooling in his native region and continued his studies in Constantinople before attending the Mekhitarist Moorat-Raphael College in Venice. From the middle of the first decade of the century he studied literature, sociology, and economics at the University of Ghent in Belgium, where he encountered contemporary European literary movements and social thought. After finishing his studies toward the end of that decade he returned to the Ottoman Empire and taught in the provinces, including Tokat and the Sivas area, before settling in the capital.

In 1912 Varoujan moved to Constantinople, taught at the Getronagan Armenian High School, and became a leading presence in the city’s Armenian literary circles. He was associated with the journal Mehyan and with a generation of writers who sought to renew Armenian poetry in both form and subject. His verse joined intense pagan and rural imagery to a sense of national and cultural revival. Principal collections published in his lifetime include The Trembling, Heart of the Race, and Pagan Songs (1912), the last often regarded as his finest work for its celebration of nature, fertility, and pre-Christian Armenian themes. A further book, The Song of the Bread, devoted to the labor and life of the Armenian peasantry, remained unfinished at his death and was issued posthumously in 1921.

Varoujan married Araksi Tashjian in 1912; they had a son, Armen. On 24 April 1915, at the start of the Armenian Genocide, he was among the Armenian intellectuals arrested in Constantinople by the Ottoman authorities and was deported inland to Çankırı. On 26 August 1915 he was taken from internment and murdered, together with the poet Rupen Sevag and others, by Ottoman officials; contemporary and later accounts place the killing in a gorge near the village of Tüney in the Çankırı district. His remains were not recovered.

His death at thirty-one ended a career that had already established him among the central voices of modern Armenian poetry. His poems continued to be read and reprinted in the Armenian diaspora and later in Soviet and independent Armenia. He is remembered as a major figure of the Armenian literary revival of the early twentieth century and as one of the well-known victims of the 1915 roundup of Constantinople’s Armenian intelligentsia.