“Nobody knows all the wounds of our national tragedy... This trouble will drive us mad”

These words of Gomidas in his final moments of lucidity are chillingly prophetic. Perhaps the original tortured artist, his pithy and disarmingly titled songs, such as I Cannot Dance and Oh, What a Delight echo the wry melancholy of The Smiths more than a peasant folk tradition of almost a century earlier. Yet both irony and incongruity were so poignant in the life and works of this Armenian priest and musician - or, to give him his lofty official title, ‘doctor of musicology’.

Gomidas on an Armenian postage stamp

He wrenched the remnants of Armenian peasant culture into the 20th century, painstakingly putting rural folk songs he came across to manuscript paper. His aim was to resurrect the cultural heritage of his homeland. Yet this was not a self-promoting scheme reminiscent of patronising narodniks attempting to incite passion in indifferent Russian serfs. It was an entirely selfless, and ultimately masochistic, task, which eventually came at the price of Gomidas’s sanity.

This is characteristic of his behaviour. Orphaned at the age of 11 and impoverished, he grew to be an anarchic and troubled soul. His classmates recalled a “frail, weak, pale boy, always thoughtful and kind... dressed poorly”, leading to his nickname: “little vagrant singer”. He also had that remarkable ability, often possessed by those with a traumatic past, to stumble upon further disaster.

He saw the tensions building between the Ottoman Turks and their ill-fated neighbours, the Armenians. When the pogroms against this wretched people began in the late 19th century, he realised that annihilation of a race, and inevitably its cultural history, was imminent.

This unwelcome dawning comprehension spurred him on to use his musical ability to put the songs of peasants and priests all over the country to manuscript paper. He formed musical arrangements for each piece, and the songs are still sung today – their presence on Spotify being a bizarre testament to his success. He preserved the songs of an entire tradition soon to be viciously attacked during the systematic massacre of his race in 1915-18.

So comprehensive was the Ottomans’ annihilation of the Armenians that it is said to have given Hitler a perverse kind of inspiration: “I have placed my death-head formations in readiness... with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion men, women and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” This remains an event of political contention for Turkey, stubborn in denial.

In a tragic twist of irony that the introspective Gomidas no doubt would have blackly appreciated had he not been its victim, his initiative brought about his downfall. On April 24th, the Armenian Genocide had officially begun. In this initial stage, the Ottomans rounded up prominent members of the Armenian intelligentsia and cultural leaders, and Gomidas being one among the 180 was forced to march across Anatolia to the city of Changr.

A statue of Gomidas in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia

Here, he witnessed the slaughter of his friends with whom he had suffered the deportation; their dying wish was for him to sing to them. Gomidas was spared, due to contacts in Constantinople ordering his return. But this acquittal was too late to save the essence of the man: after his ordeal, and the atrocities he saw, he never wrote a single piece of music again.

His sanity and spirit did not survive the genocide. During these three months of torment, the roots of his madness began to show. He is recalled to have wandered through the journey pale-faced and often mute, occasionally shrieking with bouts of uncontrollable laughter, hollow with the tone of the lost “fine sense of humour” his acquaintances had so appreciated.

Gone was his understated irreverence, signing off letters to friends in the priesthood, “greetings to your bald head”, and his light-hearted pondering, despite his misanthropic outlook, “what’s this mosquito thing anyway that man should fear it? I could have offered you such accommodation that no mosquito, not even the mosquito’s brother and its offspring could penetrate.”

The comedic, and often macabre, nature of Gomidas’s actions and art had been extinguished along with his friends in the desert. He is often called a genocide “martyr”, another fawning accolade this humble priest would have balked at, as he sacrificed himself for the preservation of Armenian culture. His musical ventures led him both to prominence and punishment.

Yet even in the psychiatric unit where he died in 1935, he was able to put poetically the suffering of his beloved country:

A flock without the shepherd lost and knocked down... Invisible but rough surges shake the miserable history of the life of my people. The callous hunters have caught the naive fish in their net. The atmosphere is filled with poison. There is no escape. Breakup, horror and violence on one hand, and indifference and dirty hearts on the other hand. Vanity and skill, on one hand, feebleness and ignorance, on the other hand... My heart is broken.