YEREVAN — Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, his wife Anna Hakobyan, and their daughter, visited Dsegh, the birthplace of Armenian poet and writer Hovhannes Toumanyan on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth.
Pashinyan laid flowers at the bust of the poet and took a tour of his house-museum, got acquainted with about 300 valuable exhibits of the writer’s life and activities.
Pashinyan made a speech, in which he particularly mentioned: “’There is Metsarents, there are Teryan and many other poets, but Tumanyan is incomplete — Ararat is our new line.’ The author of these lines was Yeghishe Charents. Often it does not happen that the poet praises poetry, but this is not a praiseworthy word; this is a hymn and a testimony to the fact that our Ararat is not one. Many people think that Ararat is on the other side of Arax, but as you can see, as Charents points out, we have Ararat on this side of Araks, and Ararat is Hovhannes Toumanyan, and Ararat is in Lori province, and Ararat is in Dsegh.”
He added, “We imagine Tumanyan today as Ararat, as an unreachable height, but he was a man who suffered all the human suffering from poverty, hunger, hunger, difficulties in life. … And what did Tumanyan do? How did he get it? Only in one thing, believing alone, only by following education. He did not even have the opportunity to get an education. He left his education half-way and went to work,” he added.
He continued that Tumanyan did not break because he believed in his own strength.
“This is Toumanyan’s message to the people, to Armenia, to the state, and today I reserve the right to say that as Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia, as prime minister elected by the free will of the people, to say to the Armenian people in the name of Tumanyan, to rise and walk,” Pashinyan said.