Yervant Odian

Early in his life, Odian attended the Berberian School (Constantinople), where he fine tuned his love of the Armenian language as well as writing.[2] Over the course of his life, Odian would come to be fluent in a number of languages, French, Turkish, and Armenian to name a few.[2] Odian would follow his love of writing, a rather humble job for someone in his family's financial position, thanks to the support he received from his uncle, who was one of biggest influences during his upbringing.[2] Odian would even be elected Deputy of the Armenian National Assembly, this was major link for him to use sources for his literally works throughout his career.[2] Though Odian would seek a life as a political satirist through writing, he was never aligned specifically with any political party, rather he believed in free thought as being the most thorough and thoughtful process of understanding political issues.[2] [[File:Human remains from the massacre of the Armenians at

By 1896, before the massacres of Armenians in Constantinople concluded, Odian left his then home and traveled across Europe seeking asylum in places like Athens (Greece), Paris (France), Vienna (Austria), and London (England), even living for some time in Bombay (India), and finally Cairo (Egypt).[6] Many of these places now have strong Armenian diaspora as a result of the latter Armenian genocide.[7]

Yervant Odian eventually returned home to Constantinople in 1909, where he took up more work as a writer.[6] In 1915, during the Armenian Genocide Odian was deported from Istanbul to the Syrian desert. He was able to avoid falling victim by becoming a translator for German officials in Deir ez-Zor since he knew French and Turkish. Sometime during his exile, while in Homs, Syria, Odian converted to Islam, against his traditional Christian background, possibly as a result of the terror he experienced during persecution.[8] Yervant's horror of the events of the Armenian genocide pushed him to write for sake of awareness, his memoirs.[2] In 1918, after World War I, he took up the responsibility of collecting orphans left over from deportations in the deserts of Syria and placing them in orphanages. His only real source of income was through his writing, as he was working for the Jamanak, currently the longest continuously running daily Armenian language newspaper in the world.[9] It was here where he published his memoirs beginning in 1919 of his time in exile during the Armenian Genocide.[9] He left Constantinople in 1922 and lived in Bucharest and various locations in the Near East. The Armenian Genocide would last until 1923, at which point an estimated 1.5 million Armenians had lost their lives to the destruction from the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic forces. Yervant Odian was an avid and heavy drinker, this vice would eventually prove fatal.[2] Yervant Odian spent the last days of his life in Cairo, Egypt where he was buried at the age of 56.