Vahram Papazyan

Vahram Papazyan — Biography

Vahram Papazyan was born in 1888 in Istanbul's Samatya district; after graduating from the Esayan School in 1902 he attended the Mıhitaryan School in Moda, and while in Venice in 1905, sent there to train for the clergy, he turned to theatre after watching performances by Petros Adamyan, going on to study under and perform with Italian actor Ermete Novelli. When he returned to Istanbul in 1908, Armenian-language theatre, banned under Abdülhamid II, was freed a month later by the Young Turk constitutional restoration; that same summer he became known for reciting a banned poem at a memorial for Armenians killed after the 1896 Ottoman Bank raid. In 1911 he played Hamlet in Turkish at the Odeon Theatre, toured Armenian communities from Tekirdağ to Egypt, and in 1913 moved to Tiflis to tour Russia. Stranded in Istanbul at the outbreak of World War I, he was wanted by police over the 1908 poem, fled a theatre after one performance, took refuge in Odessa, and then volunteered with Andranik Pasha's forces in the Caucasus. He returned to Istanbul in 1918 and made a film with Muhsin Ertuğrul before settling permanently in Armenia in 1921-1922. Invited by Reza Shah in 1933, he staged benefit performances for the Iranian Red Cross, and from 1954 until his death he was the leading actor of the Sundukyan Academic Theatre in Yerevan, earning the USSR People's Artist title and lasting fame for his Othello. He published a memoir, "Gönlümün Borcu," in 1958 and died in 1968; an annual "International Shakespeare Theatre Festival" has been held in Yerevan in his honor since 2004.