Facebook reminded me that Keghart.com online journal had posted an article I wrote twelve, 12 years ago, in April 2014. I had titled it Love During the Medz Yeghern. After some editing, I reproduced it in this blog. Vaհe H Apelian
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| Shamiram Sevag (1914-2016), the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Roupen Sevag and Helene (Yanni) Apel-Tchilinguirian |
The award-winning novelist Chris Bohjalian wrote the Sandcastle Girlsnovel in 2012. Doubleday, the publisher, did such a well-orchestrated promotion that the news of the upcoming publication of this fictional Armenian Genocide love story was enthusiastically received by the Armenian community, even before it became available on the shelves of bookstores. After its publication, a community wide frenzy seemed to come about the book. Catholicos Aram celebrated the publication of the book and publicly spoke about this fictional love story. ANCA promoted it.
A quarter-of-century before Sandcastle Girls book, journalist and editor Antranig Dzarugian (Wikipedia spelling) (Անդրանիկ Ծառուկեան) also wrote an Armenian Genocide love story and titled it Love in the Yeghern (Սէրը Եղեռնին Մէջ). Medz Yeghern is a term that the survivors of the planned extermination of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire coined alluding to the horrible reality they experienced of having family members, relatives, friends being killed, properties they owned confiscated, and they being uprooted from their millennia-old way of life on their ancestral lands. This unprecedented mass extermination and usurpation of lands and properties, would later be known as the Armenian Genocide, although that term, in my view, did not adequately define the tragic Armenian experience.
Both novels, as said, are love stories during the Armenian Genocide. Sandcastle Girls is a fictional narration about fictional characters and their, obviously, fictional love during the Armenian Genocide. But Love in the Yeghern is a real love story of the eminent early 20th century Armenian poet Roupen Sevag, and his wife Helene (Yanni) Apel.
The novel Love in Yeghern is a true depiction of Roupen’s and Yanni’s love story with a creative rendering of their lives and their Armenian community’s life, in the Ottoman Empire prior to the World War I. Anyone who has a rudimentary knowledge of the Constantinople Armenian community before the Genocide, would surmise who Dzarugian was referring to when he described characters named Varoujan, Adom, Zartarian and many more. After remaining dormant for centuries, the Western Armenian culture and community vibrancy came to its zenith in Constantinople just before the Genocide,
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| Love in the Yeghern, the cover of the book I read |
Roupen Sevag was Born there. After graduating from the Berberian School in Constantinople in 1905, he moved to Switzerland to study medicine, and graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Lausanne in 1911. In Switzerland, he fell in love with Yanni, who was of German/Prussian ancestry and they got married. The newlyweds returned to Constantinople captivated by the promise of the new constitutional order.
Their youngest child, daughter Shamiram, was born in Constantinople on July 10, 1914. Their elder child, son Levon (1912-2005), was born in Switzerland. According to an account in Agos, on April 24, 1915, three days after Shamiram's baptism ceremony in Surp Krikor Lusaroviç Church in Taksim, Roupen Sevag was arrested. The police officers took the young doctor, saying that he has to see a patient. Instead, Roupen Sevag was also sent to Çankırı, where the Armenian intellectuals arrested on April 24 were also being sent. He was killed there on August 26, along with poets Taniel Varoujan, Siamanto and others. He was 30-years-old.
Sevag is known for his patriotic and humanistic poetry and short stories. He is fondly remembered to this day. In 2011 Armenia issued a stamp in his honor. A Yerevan school is named after him. In 2012 a family museum, established and run by his nephew, was relocated from Nice, France to Holy Etchmiazin in Armenia. He also was an accomplished painter.
His wife Yanni, in vain tried to secure his release through the German embassy. After the news of her husband’s death, she took her children and returned to Lausanne in October 1915. Aware of German complicity in the genocide, she distanced her children from their German ancestry and forbade them to speak German. Dzarougian ends his novel depicting Sevag's wife Helene (Yanni) Apel. “Janine wrote poetry in French and published them in books. One of her books received an award from the French Academy. She lived engrossed in her books and in her children Levon and Shamiram. With the passing years, ashes covered her hair, but not her heart. Her heart remained fresh and vibrant defying time and the years with an indifference but always open, always graceful on white pages and in her thoughts with her Roupen…..”.
Much has been written about Roupen Sevag and in much more detail (see the link below). He remains a tragic but an iconic figure. Dzarugian’s novel Love in Yeghern makes for a captivating reading and justly immortalizes the young couple’s love story.
Love in Yeghern has not had the promotion the Sandcatle Girls novel enjoyed. Catholicos Aram has not spoken about it in public, nor has ANCA promoted the book and hailed its author, Antranig Zarougian, as it did to Chris Bohjalian and his book Sandcastle Girls. But, surely Antranig Dzarugian’s Love in Yeghern novel will long endure and outlive the Sandcastle Girls novel. It has not been translated yet.
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