Paris to dedicate alley to Armenian writer and activist Zabel Yesayan

PanARMENIAN.Net - Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo will inaugurate an alley dedicated to Armenian writer and human rights activist Zabel Yesayan on Thursday, March 8 on the occasion of the International Day of the struggle for women's rights.

Attending the event will be Viguen Tchitetchian, Armenia’s ambassador to France, Nouvelles d'Arménie reports.

Paris will honor the memory of Essayan with the inauguration of the Zabel Yesayan alley, which will be located on a central boulevard of Ménilmontant district of Paris.

Yesayan was the only female intellectual on the list of Armenians targeted for arrest and deportation by the Ottoman Young Turk government on April 24, 1915. She was able to flee arrest and reach Bulgaria and then the Caucasus, where she worked with refugees documenting their eyewitness accounts of atrocities that had taken place during the Armenian Genocide.

She returned to Soviet Armenia in 1933 but was abruptly accused of "nationalism" and arrested in 1937 during the Great Purge.

Yesayan died in unknown circumstances: there is speculation that she was drowned and died in exile, possibly in Siberia, sometime in 1943.