Hovhannes Tumanyan §

Born in Dsegh, Lori, in 1869 to a village priest of the Mamikonian lineage; published his first poems in the early 1890s and emerged as the central voice of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Armenian literature, drawing on folk epic, peasant idiom and the Caucasus landscape. His narrative poems "Anush" (1892), "The Capture of Tmkaberd" and the prose tales reworked traditional material into a national-romantic canon, and his "Four Ballads" provided the libretto for Armen Tigranian's opera. Mediated personally between Armenian and Tatar (Azerbaijani) communities during the inter-communal violence of 1905–06 in Tbilisi and Lori, and led extensive refugee-relief work for genocide survivors after 1915 through the Armenian Society for the Care of Refugees. Headed the Caucasus Society of Armenian Writers and was elected the first chairman of the Union of Armenian Writers under Soviet rule in 1921. Died of cancer in Moscow on 23 March 1923; his Yerevan house is the city's most-visited literary museum.