Personality and Legacy
Despite all of his wealth Mantashev led a modest lifestyle. He did not like gold and never wore jewellery. He only attached a fresh flower to his vest. He did not have an entourage and enjoyed travelling by tram in Tiflis. It is said that Mantashev only carried with him 20 gold coins and five rubles. Mantashev loved the theatre. In Tiflis he built the Pitoewski Theatre (now the Rustaveli Theatre). In the Academie National de Musique of Paris he had a personal lounge. He intended to build a similar theatre in Yerevan. The Small Hall of the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra was also built by him. Mantashev died on 19 April 1911 in Saint Petersburg. His body was moved to Tiflis and buried next to his wife at the cemetery of Van Cathedral which was being restored at the time with his donations. After the October Revolution of 1917, his company ceased to exist along with all the other oil companies in Russia. In 1933, by the order of Lavrentiy Beria, the Van Cathedral was destroyed along with the cemetery where Mantashev was buried. Today he is remembered in Tbilisi for his charity, where many of his buildings are still standing, and in Yerevan, where a downtown street was named after him along with a major luxury goods store. A monument of Mantashian has been erected in Yerevan in April of 2012.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Mantashev
Famous quotes containing the words personality and, personality and/or legacy:
“Personality and mind, like moustaches, belong to a certain age. They are a deformity in a child.... Leave his sensibilities, his emotions, his spirit, and his mind severely alone. There is the devil in mothers, that they must provoke personal ... response from their infants.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand—my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm’s length.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)