Armenian Leaders

The spine of the story — three millennia at a glance

Armenian statehood begins in the iron-age fortresses of Urartu, but its royal legend begins with Artaxias I (Artashes), who around 189 BC founded the Artaxiad dynasty and the capital Artashat — a city, tradition says, sited on the advice of Hannibal himself, then a fugitive at the Armenian court. Two generations later came the empire.

Tigranes II the Great (r. 95–55 BC) built, for one blazing generation, the strongest state east of Rome: an empire from the Caspian toward the Mediterranean, a new capital at Tigranocerta, and the ancient title King of Kings. Rome eventually clipped his wings — Lucullus and then Pompey — but left him his crown; he died an old king in his own land, and his silver coinage, bearing the great Armenian tiara with its star and eagles, remains the most iconic image of Armenian antiquity.

Later crowns rose and fell with the geography: Ashot I Bagratuni restored an independent kingdom in 884, and his dynasty raised Ani — the "city of a thousand and one churches" — into one of the great capitals of the medieval world. When the highland fell, the crown migrated to the sea: in 1198, Levon I was crowned king of Cilician Armenia, a Mediterranean kingdom of merchants, scriptoria, and crusader alliances that endured until 1375.

In the centuries without kings, Armenia was led by its sparapets — hereditary commanders-in-chief. The greatest name among them is Vardan Mamikonian, who at Avarayr in 451 led the nation's stand against forced conversion by Sasanian Persia and fell on the field (the full story is told in Volume I). His nephew Vahan Mamikonian finished the work by treaty: at Nvarsak in 484 Persia conceded freedom of worship, and Vahan governed Armenia as its marzpan. The soldier-saint on his rearing horse still rides in bronze above Yerevan.

Five centuries of statelessness followed Cilicia's fall, under Ottoman and Persian rule. The first modern voice of liberation was Israel Ori (1658–1711), who spent a lifetime petitioning the courts of Europe and Peter the Great's Russia for Armenia's freedom — a diplomat of a nation that did not yet exist on any map.

The moral leader of the 19th-century awakening was a priest: Mkrtich Khrimian, beloved as Khrimian Hayrik — "Father Khrimian." Sent to the Congress of Berlin in 1878 to plead the Armenian cause, he returned with a parable that entered the national bloodstream: the great powers, he said, served the harissa of liberty from a great cauldron, and each nation dipped in with an iron ladle — while Armenia had brought only a ladle of paper. The lesson — that petitions without power win nothing — shaped a generation. He was elected Catholicos of All Armenians in 1892.

Khrimian Hayrik

1820 – 1907

Catholicos · voice of the awakening

Patriarch, publisher, and "Father" of the common people of the provinces; his iron-ladle parable after Berlin 1878 became the manifesto of Armenian self-reliance.

Andranik Ozanian

1865 – 1927

Fedayi commander · "General Andranik"

The legendary guerrilla defender of Sasun who became the most famous Armenian soldier of his age, leading volunteer units in the First World War. He died in Fresno; his remains were brought home to the Yerablur pantheon in 2000.

Out of the ashes of the Genocide came, against every probability, a state. In late May 1918, with Ottoman armies driving on Yerevan, Armenian forces and volunteers turned and won three desperate battles at once — Sardarapat, Bash Aparan, and Karakilisa. On 28 May 1918 the First Republic of Armenia was declared: the first independent Armenian state in more than five centuries.

Aram Manukian

1879 – 1919

Founder of the Republic

Organizer of the heroic defense of Van in 1915 and the iron will behind Yerevan's resistance in May 1918 — remembered as the founder of the First Republic and its first interior minister. He died of typhus within a year, aged 39.

Hovhannes Kajaznuni

1868 – 1938

First Prime Minister

Architect by profession, he led the Republic's first government (1918–19) through famine, war, and half a million refugees. He perished in Stalin's purges twenty years later.

Garegin Nzhdeh

1886 – 1955

Defender of Syunik

In 1920–21 his mountain fighters held Syunik against all comers, a defiance widely credited with keeping the region within Armenia. A revered and, abroad, contested figure — his later wartime choices remain debated — he died in a Soviet prison in 1955.

The Republic lived only thirty months — squeezed between Kemalist Turkey and Soviet Russia, it was sovietized in December 1920 — but it re-established the fact of Armenian statehood on the modern map. Its generals paid the full price of the century: Movses Silikyan, the victor of Sardarapat, was executed in the purges of 1937.

For seventy years Armenia lived as a Soviet republic — industrialized, educated, and muzzled. Armenians also rose high in the Union itself: Anastas Mikoyan of Sanahin survived every leader from Lenin to Brezhnev and served as Soviet head of state. But the figure Armenians themselves remember with warmth is the republic's own long-serving chief:

Karen Demirchyan

1932 – 1999

Soviet-era leader · Speaker of Parliament

First Secretary of Soviet Armenia (1974–88), associated with the era's great construction projects and the Yerevan metro. He returned to politics in 1998, became Speaker of the National Assembly in 1999 — and fell, with Vazgen Sargsyan, on 27 October of that year. Honored posthumously as a National Hero of Armenia.

Levon Ter-Petrosyan

b. 1945

First President of independent Armenia

A philologist of the Matenadaran who became the face of the 1988 Artsakh movement, he was elected the first president of the restored Republic in October 1991 and led it through war and blockade until his resignation in 1998.

Monte Melkonian

1957 – 1993

Artsakh war commander · "Avo"

California-born archaeologist turned soldier of the Armenian cause, he commanded the Martuni front in Artsakh with legendary discipline and fell in battle in June 1993. National Hero of Armenia (1996); he rests at Yerablur.

Vazgen Sargsyan — the soldier who built the army of the Third Republic

National Hero of Armenia · Սպարապետ

Vazgen Sargsyan

5 March 1959 — 27 October 1999

A writer and athlete from the village of Ararat, Vazgen Sargsyan became the organizing will of Armenia's rebirth in arms. When the Soviet Union dissolved and war engulfed Artsakh, he forged volunteer detachments into a fighting force, served as the newly independent Republic's first Minister of Defense (1991), and built its army through the darkest years of war and blockade. He founded and led the Yerkrapah union of volunteer veterans, and to the soldiers of that generation he was simply the Sparapet — the old title of Vardan Mamikonian's line, revived for the commander of the independence war.

Returning as Defense Minister (1995–1999), he was appointed Prime Minister in June 1999 after his Unity alliance with Karen Demirchyan swept the elections — a partnership many Armenians saw as the most hopeful government of the decade. It lasted twenty weeks.

1991First Minister of Defense of the Republic

1992–95Artsakh war — organizer of the volunteer battalions

1993Founds the Yerkrapah veterans' union

1999Prime Minister of Armenia, June–October

27 Oct 1999Assassinated in Parliament

LegacyNational Hero; the military university bears his name; buried at Yerablur