Shavarsh Krissian

Shavarsh Krissian was an Ottoman Armenian writer, editor, journalist, physical-education teacher, athlete, and football coach, born on 22 July 1886 in the Beşiktaş district of Constantinople. He received his elementary schooling at the local Makruhyan School and continued at the Berberian School, a leading Armenian institution in the capital. In the first decade of the twentieth century he went to Paris to train in physical education and sport. After returning to Constantinople he taught gymnastics and related subjects in Armenian schools and became one of the principal advocates of modern athletics within the Armenian community of the Ottoman Empire.

In February 1911 he founded and edited Marmnamarz (Physical Training), the first sports periodical in the Armenian language and among the earliest of its kind in the Ottoman Empire. The magazine, which continued until the outbreak of the First World War, reported on local and international sporting events, discussed training methods and public health, and urged Armenian youth to develop physical strength alongside intellectual culture. Krissian organized interscholastic competitions and public athletic gatherings in Constantinople, promoting football, gymnastics, and track and field. His journalism and coaching helped create a network of school and club sport among Armenians in the city.

He belonged to the generation of Armenian intellectuals who used the relative freedom after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution to expand the press, schools, and voluntary societies. He treated sport as a civic and national discipline rather than mere recreation, in a cosmopolitan capital where Armenian, Greek, and other sports clubs were taking shape and football was gaining popularity. Although he did not live to see the formal founding of Homenetmen (the Armenian General Athletic Union) in 1918, that organization and later Armenian athletic movements have often traced their inspiration to Marmnamarz and to his teaching.

On 24 April 1915, in the mass arrest of Armenian community leaders in Constantinople that opened the Armenian Genocide, Krissian was detained. He was deported to the prison at Ayaş in central Anatolia. In August 1915 he was removed from detention and killed. His burial place is unknown. He is remembered as a pioneer of Armenian physical education and as one of the intellectuals murdered in 1915.