Zabel Yesayan

Zabel Yesayan (1878–1943) was an Armenian novelist, essayist, translator, teacher, and public intellectual born in Constantinople. She studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris.

After the 1909 Adana massacres, she traveled to Cilicia and documented survivors’ experiences in Among the Ruins. In 1915, she was the only woman named on the Ottoman authorities’ list of Armenian intellectuals targeted for arrest, but she escaped.

Her memoir The Gardens of Silihdar recreates her childhood world in Constantinople. Yesayan later settled in Soviet Armenia, where she taught literature before being arrested during Stalin’s Great Purge; she died in exile under uncertain circumstances.