Categories: HistoryPeople

Zabel Yesayan’s Telegram to Poghos Nubar with a Request to Save Marash Armenians from Slaughter

In a telegram sent on February 24, 1920, from Constantinople to the delegation of Poghos Nubar at the Paris Peace Conference, Armenian writer Zabel Yesayan asks to save the Armenians of Marash from slaughter.

On February 10, 1920, the French garrison was evacuated from Marash, leaving 20 thousand unarmed Armenians to face the Turkish hordes.

Zabel Yesayan

Zabel Yesayan (born Hovhannisyan) was born in the Asian district of Constantinople in 1878. A pioneer of her time, she received education abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris where she would meet and then marry Tigran Yesayan.

Fate decided that Yesayan needs to separate from her family for a long time. Her husband and daughter Sophie stayed in France, while she and her son Hrant returned to Constantinople after the Young Turk Revolution in 1908.

Read more: Zabel Yesayan – “My Soul in Exile” – in Russian

The Armenian Genocide organized by the Turkish government forced Zabel Yesayan to flee from Constantinople. Had she not escaped, she would be persecuted and killed as a member of the Armenian intelligentsia.

After returning to Paris and living there for some time, Yesayan decided to take her son and daughter and move to Armenia.

The 1915 Genocide was in the past, but a new oppression of Armenian intelligentsia commenced with the emergence of Stalin’s regime in 1937. It was precisely the enormity of the Stalinist regime that would silence Yesayan forever in 1943.

Read more: Zabel Yesayan – the innocent victim of the Stalin regime – in Russian

Read also: Photo of the Armenian Self-Defense of Van

Vigen Avetisyan

Recent Posts

The Vilgort Cup: A Silver Masterpiece of Cilician Armenia (c. 1150–1159 A.D.)

A Fragment That Traveled Across Continents The gilt-silver medallion shown above — two richly dressed…

2 days ago

Hannibal and Artaxias the Great: The Carthaginian General Who Helped Build the “Armenian Carthage”

Few episodes in ancient Armenian history capture the imagination quite like the tradition that Hannibal…

1 week ago

The Priestess of the Kingdom of Van: A 9th-Century BC Bronze Figurine in the British Museum

Five angles of one small bronze figure — and what emerges is not an abstract…

2 weeks ago

The Winged Sun and the Armenian Tiara: Royal Symbolism of the Orontid (Yervanduni) Kingdom of Commagene, 163 BC – 72 AD

Introduction Among the successor states that emerged from the fragmentation of the Achaemenid-derived Orontid (Armenian:…

3 weeks ago

A Bronze Age Vessel from Gardman: Solar Symbolism, the Sun-Cross, and the Sacred Landscape of Ancient Armenia

Article based on the explanations and interpretive observations of Angela Terian, with additional archaeological and…

3 weeks ago

Rewriting the Caucasus: A Documented Look at Azerbaijan’s Historical Revisionism Regarding Armenia

Lenin: Soviet nationalities policy, Azerbaijan SSR founded 1920, Stalin: Constitution and census fix the ethnonym…

3 weeks ago