Istanbul theater plays Armenian writer Hakob Paronyan's work

Istanbul Municipal Theater is getting ready to stage famous Armenian writer Hakop Paronyan’s Eastern Worker in its new season, Hurrriyet Daily News reported.

This is the first time an Armenian play is going to be staged in Turkey.

“Armenians are the foundation of Turkish theater. Artists bred in this area are the DNA of this land. We need to claim our past if we want to modernize. Unfortunately, we are a society without a memory,” said Ayshenil Shamlioglu, Istanbul Municipal Theater’s general art director.

The theater would be greatly pleased to bring the play to Armenia with its huge cast as well, Shamlioglu added.

“We also marginalize our people. We ignored people who had been living on this soil for thousands of years due to ideological reasons. It is impossible for us to eradicate Armenian artists from Turkish theater,” Engin Algan, who adapted Baronyan’s work for the stage, recently told the Turkish paper.

Algan is said to have encountered Paronyan’s name by chance in a theater magazine called “Mimesis.” He then found out about the work on the Internet.

“[It is] a very important and unique work in literary terms as much as in theatrical terms despite having been written in 1860,” Algan said.

Regarded as a landmark persona in western Armenian literature, which developed primarily in Istanbul during the 19th century, Baronyan was marginalized in his own time due to his biting language. A comedy writer and journalist, Baronyan posthumously became part of the classical cannon with his work.