Armenian National Awakening (Zartonk) §

The Armenian National Awakening (Zartonk, "rebirth") was the cultural-political modernisation movement of the Armenian people from the 1840s to 1918. It produced the literary, journalistic, educational, ecclesiastical and political institutions out of which 20th-century Armenian nationalism would emerge.

Three regional centres drove it. In Italy and Austria, the Mkhitarist Catholic congregation (founded 1717 by Mkhitar of Sebaste) had already produced the philological and historical scholarship that would underwrite the awakening, including the multi-volume Haykazian Dictionary (1749–69) and the printed editions of medieval Armenian historians. In Russian-ruled Eastern Armenia, the Tiflis-centred intelligentsia produced a vernacular Eastern Armenian literature anchored by Khachatur Abovian's Wounds of Armenia (1841, posthumous 1858), the journals Hyusisapayl (Northern Lights) under Mikael Nalbandian and Mshak (the Cultivator), and the patriotic novels of Raffi. The poet Hovhannes Tumanyan became the canonical voice of the late awakening. In the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian community of Constantinople produced a parallel reformist current that secured the 1863 Armenian National Constitution and the modernisation of the Patriarchate.

The political phase of the Zartonk produced the first modern Armenian parties: the Armenakan Party of Van (1885), the Hunchakian (Geneva, 1887), and the Dashnaktsutyun (Tiflis, 1890). Their programmes ranged from constitutional reform of the Ottoman state to socialist revolution and national liberation. Fedayee networks fought back during the Hamidian massacres (1894–96) and the Adana massacre (1909).

The awakening's terminal moment was paradoxical. The Russian February 1917 revolution and the establishment of the First Republic of Armenia in May 1918, defended at Sardarapat, represented the Zartonk's first sovereign achievement, even as the Armenian Genocide of 1915–23 destroyed the Ottoman demographic base in which much of the awakening had been rooted. Soviet Armenia (1920–91) inherited and partly preserved the awakening's literary and educational institutions while suppressing its political parties (sourced opinion: Panossian reads Soviet Armenia as a continuation, in altered form, of the modernising-secularising vector of the Zartonk).