When Gabriel Sundukyan was exiled to Derbent, he did not give up and didn’t remain idle. Instead, he designed this beautiful church in the place of a small chapel at an Armenian cemetery.
The Church of the Holy Savior in Derbent is protected by UNESCO. And we thought that Gabriel Sundukyan was exclusively a master of a pen.
Gabriel Sundukyan (July 11, 1825, Tiflis – March 29, 1912) was an Armenian writer and playwright, as well as one of the founders of critical realism in Armenian literature. He was born in Tiflis into a wealthy merchant family.
In 1846-1850, he studied at the Oriental Department of the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. He received a degree in oriental languages and was appointed an interpreter in the office of the Caucasian governor-general.
In 1850-1853, Sundukyan worked as a translator at the office of the governor of the Caucasus, then as head of the economic department of the Caucasus Road Administration in Tiflis.
In 1853, Sundukyan for his progressive views was dismissed from service and exiled to Derbent.
In 1858, Sundukyan returned to Tiflis. All his life, he was in public service, rising to the civil rank of Active State Councillor (equal to Major-General in the Russian Empire’s Army and Rear Admiral in the Navy).
Read more: Gabriel Sundukian
Historian and human rights activist Arif Yunusov lives in exile in the Netherlands. In an…
When people talk about the antiquity of Armenia, they often begin with a grand formula…
Analysis. Information current as of 13 November 2026. On 7 November, Germany's DW published a…
The story of one of Yerevan's oldest burial grounds, erased in the 1930s Show Image…
How the cuneiform archives of the Hittite capital came to record a powerful mountain kingdom…
Excavations on the northwestern edge of the Armenian capital have uncovered an open-air Upper Paleolithic…