By KADIR AKIN
I spent a significant part of May in Beirut. Although I had visited the city many times before, this time I had the opportunity to explore it alone and get to know it in more detail. While browsing through various archives, I accidentally discovered the KOHAR Library. It turned out that my friend Aleks’s daughter, Dsovak, worked there. During my visit, I learned that it was a center specializing in Armenian songbooks and dictionaries.
Researcher Garo Derounian gave me a tour of the facility. Located in a two-story building owned by the Khachaturian family, the library and bookbinding workshop were impressively modern. On the ground floor, I met skilled workers—men and women whose family roots traced back to Adana, Marash, and Antep. They greeted me in Turkish spoken in their ancestral regions. In their expert hands, fragmented books and booklets from around the world were being meticulously restored page by page and rebound to take their place in the upstairs library.
The collection includes over 1,000 books on Armenian manuscripts, the Kingdom of Cilicia, and testimonies of the Armenian Genocide, along with more than 2,300 Armenian songbooks and 500 dictionaries. The oldest book in the collection dates back to 1633. The library also holds more than 3,500 music cassettes, CDs, DVDs, and LPs.
The name “KOHAR” comes from the mother of the Khachaturian family. A large symphony orchestra established in her name toured globally and even performed concerts in Turkey, before concluding its mission five years ago. Today, the name KOHAR lives on in Beirut through this bookbindery and library.
Paramaz’s Play
At the end of our tour, Garo said, “Now I have a surprise for you,” and handed me a small booklet that had been found five years ago in an old bookstore in Chicago. It had been cleaned and rebound. The booklet turned out to be a play written by Paramaz. He told me that the booklet contained information about its content, the date it was written, and where it was performed. He later sent me a PDF copy of it.
I first learned that Paramaz had written a play while preparing my book “Armenian Revolutionary Paramaz.” A translation of an Armenian letter had come across my desk, in which a party member from Van wrote to Paramaz:
“We performed your ‘Hands Up’ play once for the benefit of the Kundakjian Girls’ School and raised 30 lira. We also staged a performance at the Navy for the benefit of the Ottoman fleet.”
So, I knew that Paramaz had written at least one play, but I was unaware there might be more. I sent the PDF to my friend Garabed Yelegen, who lives in Geneva, for translation. Here is what he wrote:
“According to the preface, this play was copied in three handwritten versions and sent to America, where it was published in 1919. Although the cover describes it as a musical drama, there are only two or three folk songs in it—so it cannot be considered a musical. The play’s story is based on real events and was adapted to the dialect of Diyarbakır in 1912 for a school performance at the Arekyan School. The plot centers around a local figure named Garabed Agha and the hardships experienced in that region. It portrays how Garabed Agha and his daughter, acting as usurers, lent money at high interest rates and then seized the property of impoverished Armenian villagers. The story ends with Garabed Agha’s son disappearing with the money and the patriarch’s tragic downfall
A Courageous Playwright on the Gallows
It has been 110 years since Paramaz (Matteos Sarkissian) and his 19 comrades were unjustly executed in Beyazıt Square following a sham trial. It has also been 10 years since my book on this subject was published.
Much has been written and said about this subject over the past decade. However, much of the socialist left—polluted by nationalism—has treated the matter with what Marx once referred to in a letter to Kugelmann as a “conspiracy of silence.” Despite this, the study I conducted sparked a reevaluation of the history of socialist movements in these lands and brought about a paradigm shift.
To keep the subject alive and to commemorate the 110th anniversary of Paramaz’s execution, I also want to remember him today not only as a revolutionary but as the author of a play titled “What the Wind Brings, the Wind Takes Away.”
May the memory of Paramaz and his comrades live on.
“AGOS”
Translated from Turkish
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Kadir Akin is one of the founders of both the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and the Socialist Reestablishment Party (SYKP). Undergoing a period of imprisonment from 1982 to 1988 following the September 12th coup in 1980, Kadir Akin has contributed to the editorial boards of various socialist magazines and newspapers.
Kadir Akin is also author of the books:
‘The Crisis of Socialism: Unity and Re-establishment’
‘In the Trail of Hidden History – Modernization in the Ottoman Empire, Constitution, Roots of Socialism, and Armenian Deputies.’
‘Armenian Revolutionary Paramaz: Armenian Socialists from Abdulhamid to the Committee of Union and Progress and Genocide’. His documentary RED is based on this book
