Saint Daniel Varujan

Daniel Varoujan (Armenian: Դանիէլ Վարուժան, 20 April 1884 – 26 August 1915) was an Armenian poet of the early 20th century. At the age of 31, when he was reaching international stature, he was deported and murdered by the Young Turk government, as part of the officially planned and executed Armenian genocide. Varoujan was born Daniel Tchboukkiarian (Դանիէլ Չպուքքեարեան) in the village of Prknig (now called Çayboyu) near the town of Sivas in Turkey. After attending the local school, he was sent in 1896, the year of the Hamidian massacres, to Istanbul, where he attended the Mkhitarian school. He then continued his education at the Moorat-Raphael College in Venice, and in 1905 entered Ghent University in Belgium, where he followed courses in literature, sociology and economics. In 1909 he returned to his village where he taught for three years. After his marriage with Araksi Varoujan in 1912, he became the principal of St. Gregory The Illuminator School in Constantinople. In 1914, he established the Mehean literary group and magazine with Gostan Zarian, Hagop Oshagan, Aharon Dadourian and Kegham Parseghian. The movement aimed to start an Armenian literary and artistic renaissance. Participants saw as their purpose creating a "center", a temple of Art which, according to their manifesto, would attract a fragmented and spiritually scattered nation in order to promote its artistic creativity. Heavily influenced by Nietzschean ideas, they struggled, however, to reconcile two opposing directions in their understanding of ends and means, that is, between art as means to find a "center" for the nation, or centering the nation as a means to achieving meaningful and universal artistic creation, the latter being Varoujan's position.