From now on the secondary school N 180 will bear the name of the eminent novelist, publicist, literature critic Zapel Yesayan. The project was earlier submitted to the Council of Elders and approved.
Yerevan Deputy Mayor Tigran Avinyan,  ESCS Minister Zhanna Andreasyan, head of General Education Department of Yerevan Municipality Margarit Khachatryan, head of Avan administrative district Vahe Hakobyan, members of Yerevan Council of Elders and others were present at the event. Deputy Mayor Tigran Avinyan congratulated those present on the event and stressed that giving a name to the school doesn’t only mean that schools should have a name but because with this step they hour an Armenian woman, a public and political figure whose role in our history and our future can’t be exaggerated. Zapel Yesayan and other Armenian women should serve a model to follow for today’s generation, to open the road for those women and girls who will be more active in the public life of our country and undertake the responsibility for our city and our land.
The ESCS Minister stressed that when a school is named after an eminent figure, it should be considered as a responsibility for preserving the legacy and promoting it. The Ministry is willing to show all support to women to make their role more visible. Zapel Yesayan is one of the strongest women in our history who can serve an example both for girls and for boys to join their efforts to make our country stronger.
The performance entitled “100 years later” was presented during the event. It told about the most outstanding moments of Zapel Yesayan’s life, as well as showed some extracts from the private conversations with the 20th century Armenian poet Shushanik Kurghinyan and the stateswoman, MP of the First Armenian Republic Katarine Zalyan-Manukyan. Zapel Yesayan was one of thebravest Armenian women. She was born in 1878 in Constantinople. She studied at the local college of Holy Cross and in 1895 left for Paris where as an editor-corrector she participated in the creation of Lusinyan Dictorionary, attended lectures at Sorbonne University and at College de France, faculty of literature and philosophy. In April of 1909, after the massacres of Armenians organized by Young Turks, together with Armenian intellectuals she moved to the places of the catastrophe. For three months she had been moving about and hearing out to those who witnessed the massacres, then retold everything in her novels. Zapel Yesayan was the only woman subject to deportation on the night of April 24, 1015, whose name was mentioned in the list drawn up in advance. Barely escaped from the Armenian Genocide, she left for Bulgaria, then to Romania, and at the end of 2015 to the Caucasus. Throughout this time and afterwards, due to her efforts numerous orphans were saved and sheltered.
In 1933, Zapel Yesayan got a job offer from Yerevan State University. In the years of Stalin’s tyranny, after a speech she made at the Union of Writers, she was arrested. The circumstances of her tragic death are still unknown. According to some data, she died in 1943.
The pipuls of the school claimed that they feel proud to study at the school named after the great patriot and will do their best to make the activity and name of Zapel Yesayan more recognizable.