AURORA PRIZE

Yervant senior became the chief accountant and treasurer of the State of Aleppo in the 1920s and worked till he retired in 1943. He was strongly committed to the Armenian community, particularly to young Armenians. His position enabled him to offer employment to many of his compatriots. “Unfortunately, I didn’t know him personally. He died before I was born. However, people often spoke of him and referred to him,” says Yervant. For 25 years, his grandfather held prominent positions in the AGBU, and in 1931 he founded the AGBU Armenian Youth Association, which continued to advocate for education and professional training among Armenian youth. In 1946-1947, he played a key role in efforts to repatriate people to then-Soviet Armenia.  

Apik, however, did not have the same fortune. He remained in Trabzon where he was abducted by Ottoman soldiers before his wife and three children were forced on a death march through the mountains of Anatolia. Along the way, the mother entrusted two of her children to a Turkish peasant and, in doing so, saved their lives. Her son, Ashod Zorian, later became a renowned painter. After the atrocities of 1915, he and his sister were taken in by their cousin and her Iraqi husband, an army officer, who passed them off as Arab relatives. His boarding school in Constantinople nurtured Ashod’s artistic talent and won scholarships to study at fine arts institutes in Vienna and Rome. In 1929 he moved to Egypt, where he worked in Armenian schools and began to teach in his own studio. “Even the wife of the King of Egypt is said to have studied painting under him,” says Dr. Zorian. “This is also where he painted the portraits of numerous celebrities when they visited Cairo.” Using his Nansen passport, Ashod would regularly visit his uncle Yervant and his family in Aleppo. “I remember he would often play with me and my sisters, but he never married and never had children of his own. His memories of his childhood years always seemed to haunt him,” Yervant remembers. 

Dr. Zorian’s parents, Apik and Hilda, continued the family’s tradition of serving the Armenian community in Aleppo, especially in education. After studying engineering at St. Joseph University in Beirut, Apik spent 30 years as technical director of the Electricity and Water Company in Aleppo. In his free time, in addition to leading the AGBU education committee of Syria, Apik researched Armenian architecture and fine arts and published three award-winning books on the impact of Armenian culture. 

This ensured that Dr. Zorian’s Armenian identity and heritage became an essential part of his life from a young age. In Aleppo, he attended the AGBU high school and became committed to its students’ society. He continued his graduate studies in Los Angeles and Montreal, where his future wife, Rita Chadarevian, was attending medical school. Eventually, they settled down in Silicon Valley, where Yervant established the Silicon Valley branch of AGBU, and in 2006 founded the AGBU Armenian Virtual College (AVC), which provides Armenians worldwide with the opportunity to connect with their identity by studying Armenia’s history, culture and language online.

“We all need to give back to our nation, especially to its next generation, for the wealth that we inherited. Every Armenian can find a way to foster the prosperity of this nation by leveraging his or her know-how. As a worker in the technology domain, I concentrated on advocating for the IT sector in Armenia and offering Armenian knowledge via technology,” Yervant says proudly adding: “As a result, today the world’s premier self-repair technology is produced in Armenia by our team at Synopsys, and, so far, over 16,000 online learners around the world benefited from Armenian Virtual College courses and e-books. For generations, my family was fortunate enough to be able to use education as a weapon in the most challenging circumstances; through my work, I simply hope to extend the same opportunity to the next generation of Armenians.”