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DANIEL VARUJAN
1884 - 1915
From childhood Daniel Varoujan (alternate spelling: Taniel
Varuzhan, Daniel Varujan) had endured great hardship and suffering.
When he was a boy, his father had been falsely accused and jailed
in Istanbul, during the 1896 Turkish massacres of Armenians.
After Varoujan’s schooling in Istanbul he studied in Venice
and then at the University of Ghent in Belgium, the largest and
oldest in Belgium today.
He taught, first in his native village near Sebastia, then in
Istanbul as headmaster of an Armenian school. His first book of
poems, The Trembling, appeared in 1906. It was followed by The Heart
of a Nation (1909), Pagan Songs (1912), and, after his death in
1915, The Songs of Bread (1921). His work contains some of the most
sensual imagery in Armenian literature. He was arrested on April
24, 1915 and was savagely tortured to death...
by Ruth Bedevian
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