Komitas: Victim of the Great Crime

Meliné Karakashian

This is the third publication, the first and second editions being in Eastern and Western Armenian, respectively. The book is divided into two parts. Part I covers Komitas Vartabed’s life story, education, religious life, and prolific music career up to 1915. Part II covers his state of mind and psychiatric hospitalizations after 1915. There is a popular belief that Komitas went “mad” after the Great Crime of 1915. The book challenges this belief. Komitas being a very sensitive and bright artist, understood the impact of the tragedy on the Armenian people and exhibited symptoms we now refer to as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which is considered a natural reaction to his experiences and which was not recognized as such in 1916. He was wrongfully committed to a Turkish military psychiatric hospital, then sent to a psychiatric hospital in Paris, and later to an asylum for hopeless mental patients. The diagnoses varied according to the circumstances. It is significant that the psychiatrist who knew him for 13 years wrote, “I was forgetting the diagnosis; I think they said … but since this patient never says a word, it is hard to know him.” Komitas’s expressed anger and silence which were interpreted as symptoms of his “madness” at the time (while Armenians are still coping with the trauma of this tragedy). Since Komitas’s story is prone to controversies, special effort was made to find primary sources, such as reports of his contemporaries. The interpretations of psychiatrists include psychiatric records in Paris, which the author has obtained. The author presents numerous references and allows the reader to reach a conclusion on the mental health of the greatest champion and savior of Armenian folk music before the Great Crime.