Komitas Vardapet as an Armenian 'lieu de mémoire'
The University of Warsaw’s Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper discovers an artist who “epitomized the dire fate of Armenian people” during the Genocide.
When you visit museums dedicated to particular Armenian artists, and when you walk around the city spaces of Yerevan which are filled with signs of memory, you become convinced that all artists refer to each other and become, for each other, symbols of the Armenian fate. Armenian culture survived for several centuries without a state of its own. However, at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many outstanding artists developed their activities, which ensured the survival of Armenian culture and handed it over to the world. They wrote down the traditional Armenian culture, but also created it, becoming over time its important elements. This was also the case with Komitas – a composer, priest and one of the first ethnomusicologists in the world, but also a symbol of the Armenian intelligentsia destroyed during the Genocide. Through constant references to Komitas, he became recognizable not only through his works but also through his biography, and even through his characteristic image preserved in photographs and paintings by Armenian artists.
The statue of Komitas in front of the Conservatory in Yerevan
Komitas was born as Soghomon Soghomonian on 8 October 1869 in small town in Anatolia as a son of shoemaker and carpet weaver. Everyone in his hometown knew him as a singer with an extraordinary voice and talent. He was orphaned when he was eleven and then was taken by a local priest to Echmiadzin – the religious capital of the Apostolic Armenian Church. When he arrived there, he only spoke Turkish as the Armenian language was forbidden by the Ottoman authorities. According to an often cited story: “when being greeted by the Catholicos Gevorg IV, he replied, ‘I don’t speak Armenian, if you wish I will sing’. Then with his fine soprano voice he sang an Armenian sharakan (a church hymn) without understanding the words”[1]. However, during his years at the Gevorgian Seminary in Echmiadzin, Komitas not only learned the Armenian language perfectly, but also the Armenian music notation (khaz) system and started to collect Armenian songs and music in local villages.
Armenian Catholicos opened his way to Armenian language and music and Armenian oil magnate Alexander Mantashyan opened his way to European music and humanities by funding his study at the Frederick William University in Berlin. After years of learning how to sing, compose and research music, he came back to Echmiadzin and started his ethnomusicological work. He collected more than 3,000 pieces of Armenian folk music and in 1903 published a collection of 50 folks songs titled One Thousand and One Songs, followed two years later by a collection of another 50 songs. He travelled to various Armenian regions to study not only Armenian music but also Kurdish, Persian and Turkish songs. In 1903 he published Kurdish melodies – the first-ever collection of Kurdish folk music. In 1910 Komitas moved to Constantinople where he founded the mixed Gusan choir of 300 musicians.The choir was very popular and presented Armenian music through dozens of concerts.
The painting “Choirmaster Komitas” by Yeghishe Tadevosyan, 1935
However, it was also in Constantinople where Komitas, together with 180 other Armenian notables and artists, was arrested on 24 April 1915 and sent to the city of Çankırı in northern Central Anatolia. It is this day that is officially considered the beginning of the Armenian Genocide committed by the Turks, and Komitas is perceived as one of the main symbols of the Armenian Genocide in art. After the intervention of his Turkish friends and the U.S. ambassador, Komitas was dispatched back to Constantinople, but after witnessing cruelty and violence and hearing about Armenian death marches and massacres on an enormous scale, he experienced a mental breakdown. In 1916 he was taken to a hospital in Constantinople and three years later was moved to France. He never recovered from the state that later was named by psychiatrists as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and spent his last 16 years in a psychiatric clinic where he died on 22 October 1935. And, to add to this tragedy, the majority of his manuscripts were destroyed or lost. But some of his work did survive, as did the memory of him which transformed immediately after his death into a symbol of Armenian culture and fate. And we can easily find that this symbol is still very vivid also today.
One can hear about Komitas's compositions almost everywhere, which are cited as the most beautiful, moving and best reflections of ‘Armenian soul’ songs. There are also many places where we can see his image – the characteristic slim figure in a hood or the pensive face of a bearded man. His figure or his name can be found on monuments, plaques and posters.
In every art gallery or museum we could come across at least one painting depicting him. Some of them, such as the painting by Yeghishe Tadevosyan Choirmaster Komitas of 1935 (above left), shaped the visual thinking about this person and became the basis for subsequent artistic interpretations.
Wax flower from the funeral of Komitas in Yerevan, Yeghishe Charents Museum in Yerevan
In almost every museum devoted to Armenian cultural creators – painters, sculptors, writers, musicians – we can find pictures of Komitas (as a friend of a given artist or as a figure he admired). The memory of Komitas is also an element of the biographies of famous Armenians. In the museum of Yeghishe Charents – a poet and writer repressed by the Soviet authorities – we learn that he escaped from house arrest only to attend the funeral of ashes of Komitas in the Pantheon in Yerevan in the spring of 1936. He also wrote for him one of his greatest works: Requiem Aeternal to the Memory of Komitas, and he kept at home a blue wax flower from the composer’s funeral, which survived all historical turmoil and is now exhibited in the poet’s museum (image right).
Illustration “Genocide” by Grigor Khanjyan from the Museum-Institute of Komitas in Yerevan
In the Museum-Institute of Komitas in Yerevan, we can find many documents, photos, souvenirs, objects and publications related to him. However, his tragic fate during the Genocide, his mental breakdown and death, are not narrated with any document, photo or publication – but only through Armenian art: illustrations by Grigor Khanjyan to the poem dedicated to the life of Komitas titled The Unceasing Bell-Tower by Paruyr Sevak.
The figure of Komitas is the keystone of the memory that shaped the modern Armenian nation – memory of its old culture, old religion and the Armenian Genocide. As Harutyun Marutyan wrote, Komitas “epitomized the dire fate of Armenian people”[1] and that is why his image is used during protests, manifestations or commemorations connected with Armenian tragedies. And it is also a testimony to the existence of a creative community of memory that is constantly shown to visitors in the pictures, sounds and words of both art and everyday life.
Footnotes
[1] Komitas, Armenian Palette, 2014, Yerevan: ASCL, vol. 15, p. 6.
[2] Harutyun Marutyan, Iconography of Armenian Identity, vol. 1. The Memory of Genocide and the Karabagh Movement, 2009, Yerevan: Gitutyun – Publishing House of NAS RA, p.143.
Dr Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Sociology’s Center for Research on Social Memory at the University of Warsaw. Her main research interests are contemporary developments in ethnic and national identity and problems of social memory and tradition. Małgorzata has conducted fieldwork in Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia and in the Siberian part of Russia. She has published several articles and books on ethnic minorities in Poland, ethnic identity and social memory in post-soviet countries and on the memory of resettlements. Currently she is working on the relationship between memory and religion in local communities, and on Central Europe from a post-colonial perspective.