Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris, will inaugurate the Zabel Essayan alley on Thursday, March 8, on the occasion of the International Day of struggle for women’s rights, in the presence of His Excellency Mr. Viguen Tchitetchian, Ambassador of the Republic of Armenia in La France.

Zabel Essayan was an Armenian woman writer and human rights activist. Paris will commemorate the memory of Zabel Essayan on Thursday by the inauguration of the “Zabel Essayan alley”, which will be located on the central boulevard of Ménilmontant, starting Avenue de la République and ending rue de Tlemcen and rue Spinoza, in Paris (11th and 20th).

Zabel Essayan (born Hovhannessian) was born on February 4, 1878 in Constantinople, in the Ottoman Empire. Emigrated to Paris, she enrolled at the Sorbonne. In his major work titled In the Ruins (1911), Zabel Essayan recounts the massacre of Armenians in 1909 in the city of Adana, during which Christian neighborhoods are destroyed. More than thirty thousand Armenians are massacred in Cilicia, a former Roman province nowadays in Turkey.

Zabel Essayan travels Europe to defend the cause of his people. It shows immense determination to support the education of young girls, but also the countless orphans who have survived the Armenian genocide. In 1933, she moved permanently to Yerevan, where she became holder of the chair of Western Literature at the State University.

Victim of the Stalinist purges, Zabel Essayan was arrested in 1937 and disappeared in 1943.

Thursday, March 8, 2018 at 3:15 pm, median, corner Spinoza (11th) and Tlemcen (20th)
In the presence of Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris; Patrick Klugman, Deputy Mayor of Paris, in charge of international relations and La Francophonie; His Excellency Mr. Viguen Tchitetchian, Ambassador of the Republic of Armenia to France; Frédérique Calandra, Mayor of the 20th arrondissement; François Vauglin, Mayor of the 11th arrondissement