Khachatur Abovyan - Return To Armenia

Return To Armenia

In 1836 he returned home anxious to embark on a mission of enlightenment. Abovian’s efforts were thwarted as he faced a growing and hostile reaction from the Armenian clergy as well as Tsarist officials, largely stemming from his opposition to dogmatism and formalism in the school system. Abovian was appointed as the supervisor of the Tiflis uyezd school and married a German woman named Emilia Looze (d. 1870) in 1839. In 1840 he was approached by English traveller Anne Lister who was visiting Tiflis. She hoped that Abovian would guide her on another expedition to Mount Ararat which ultimately did not occur. He was dismissed from the school in 1843 and was transferred to the uyezd school of Yerevan where he also encountered apathy and antagonism from his colleagues and the clergy.

In the summer of the same year, Abovian was visited by two German travellers. A Bavarian professor Moritz Wagner from the University of Munich arrived in May and toured the Lake Sevan region with Abovian and thereafter corresponded with him on a regular basis. In July Abovian also accompanied Wagner on the first recorded ascent of Mount Aragats in Armenia. In August, Abovian spent several days escorting a Prussian agronomist Baron August Franz von Haxthausen around the province. Together they visited a Yazidi encampment where they met the chief Timur Aga and exchanged pleasantries with a rider from Count Paskevich's guard. Abovian became a trusted friend of the Yazidi community in Armenia, and when the chief returned with lavish gifts from a banquet in Tiflis organized by the viceroy of the Caucasus Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov in 1844, he organized a tribal feast and Abovian was invited to attend. In 1845 he applied for a position at the Catholicate of Echmiadzin but was turned down. In 1846 Abovian became a contributor to Vorontsov's weekly paper Kavkaz, for which he wrote three articles.