Today is the birthday of Komitas Vartabet, the great Armenian cleric, gifted composer and musician. He was born on September 26, 1869 in Kutahya.

On "Red Sunday", April 24, 1915, the actual beginning of the state-organized genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, he was arrested in Constantinople with several hundred other Armenian intellectuals and deported to Çankırı (east of Ankara).

Although he was saved from death through the intervention of some influential personalities, he was never able to fully recover from the events he had to witness. The following year, friends delivered him to a Turkish military hospital because of his increasingly deteriorating mental state. From there he was taken to Paris in 1919, where he was first admitted to a private clinic in Ville-Evrard. From 1922 until his death in 1935 he lived in total isolation in the psychiatric clinic of Villejuif.

A year later after his death, his remains were taken to Yerevan and buried in the Pantheon.

Incense and prayer for his blessed memory.

DAKD