Ruben Sevak

Ruben Sevak was the pen name of Ruben Chilingirian, an Armenian poet, prose writer, and physician who was killed during the Armenian Genocide. He was born on 15 February 1885 in Silivri, a town on the Sea of Marmara in the European part of the Ottoman Empire, not far from Constantinople. He received his secondary education at the Berberian School in Constantinople, one of the leading Armenian educational institutions of the late Ottoman period. After completing his studies there he went to Switzerland and enrolled in the medical faculty of the University of Lausanne, graduating as a doctor of medicine in 1911.

During his years in Lausanne, Chilingirian adopted the literary name Sevak, from an Armenian word meaning “black,” and began to publish poems and short prose in Western Armenian. His writing belongs to the last generation of the Western Armenian literary revival, produced in Constantinople and in the diaspora just before the destruction of that community. In Switzerland he married Helene Apell, a German woman; the couple had children. After receiving his medical degree he practiced as a physician in Europe while continuing to write and to contribute to Armenian periodicals. Contemporary accounts describe him as combining a modern medical education with a strong attachment to Armenian letters and to the cultural life of the Ottoman Armenian millet.

In 1914 Sevak returned with his family to Constantinople. On 24 April 1915 the Ottoman government began a round-up of Armenian intellectuals, editors, teachers, clergy, and community leaders in the capital. Sevak was arrested in that operation, which is conventionally taken as the opening of the Armenian Genocide. He was deported from Constantinople into the interior of Anatolia and held with other detainees at Çankırı. On 26 August 1915 he and several fellow prisoners, among them the poet Daniel Varoujan, were removed from Çankırı by members of the Special Organization and murdered. His remains were not identified or given a known burial.

Sevak’s poems and prose pieces were collected and published posthumously and have remained part of the Western Armenian literary canon. He is remembered both as a lyric poet and as one of the murdered intellectuals of 1915, a group that included many of the leading writers of his generation. On 23 April 2015 the Armenian Apostolic Church, in a ceremony at Holy Etchmiadzin presided over by Catholicos Karekin II, canonized the victims of the Armenian Genocide as martyrs. Their collective feast is observed on 24 April. Although Sevak had been a layman and a physician rather than a cleric, he is counted among those martyrs in the church’s commemoration.