Director of Matenadaran Hrachya Tamrazyan Dies

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MatenadaranobitYEREVAN — Hrachya Tamrazyan, a poet, scholar and publisher, who had headed the Matenadaran Institute of Ancient Manuscripts for eight years, died here on Monday following a long illness. He was 63.

Tamrazyan was born in Yerevan.

He graduated from the Department of Armenian philology of Yerevan State University (1976) and obtained his doctorate in the field in 1999.  As a researcher, he began his lifelong association with the Matenadaran.

A graduate of the Yerevan State University’s Armenian Philology Department, Tamrazyan started work at the Matenadaran in 1977, rising from the rank of junior laboratory assistant to junior and senior researcher. From 1988 until 1991, he was the editor-in-chief of the publishing house Sovetakan Grogh (Soviet House). Later, until 1993, he was the director of the publishing house Nayiri. Tamrazyan has been a member of the Writers’ House of Armenia since 1986.

Tamrazyan’s appointment in 2007 as director of the Matenadaran, ushered in a bright decade of accomplishments.  Not only was the new annex of the Matenadaran completed, but also hundreds of manuscripts and documents were acquired and a number of significant, innovative initiatives and projects, such as digitization, were launched.

Above all, he recruited and nurtured a large number of young scholars, closing the growing generational gap, and providing vigor and continuity to the cadres and work of the Matenadaran.

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Tamrazyan was also a gifted poet whose art, in communion with medieval Armenian poetry and informed by the latest literary and intellectual trends, in many ways enriched contemporary Armenian poetry.  So did his renowned scholarship encompassing medieval Armenian literature in general and Grigor Narekatsi and his immediate circle in particular, opening new vistas with deep insights.

 

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