The Yerevan City Council renamed two streets at its session on October 13, changing Frunze Street in the Shengavit district to Yervantuni Street, after Armenia’s first royal dynasty, and the 3rd Street of Nor Aresh in the Erebuni district to Metakse Street, after the poet, writer and translator Metakse Poghosyan.
Frunze Street runs from Garegin Nzhdeh Street to Bagratunyats Street, so it now sits between two streets already named for the commander and for the Bagratuni dynasty. The Nor Aresh street begins near the Artashat canal, runs parallel to Rostovyan Street and reaches Azatamartikneri Street.
The justification put before the council stated that the biography and activity of Mikhail Frunze, who lived from 1885 to 1925, are tied mainly to the political and military history of the Russian Empire and Soviet Russia, with no direct link to Armenian history. It described the Yervantuni name as bound to an important period in the formation and preservation of Armenian statehood, and called the capital’s street names a part of the city’s historical memory and identity.
Both items were adopted inside a package of questions that did not require a report, the same mechanism the council used in June to rename Amiryan Street in Kentron after King Pap. Items in such a package are not debated on the floor, and no vote count was published for either street.
Frunze Commanded the Red Army and Opened Soviet Ties With Ankara
Frunze joined the Bolsheviks at 18 and commanded the Red Army’s Eastern Front from July 1919, after his forces defeated Admiral Kolchak at Omsk. He took Khiva in February 1920, Bukhara that September, and Crimea in November 1920, driving out Pyotr Wrangel’s forces.
In December 1921 he traveled to Ankara during the Turkish War of Independence as envoy of the Ukrainian Soviet republic and helped establish relations between the Soviets and the Turkish nationalist government.
He became People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs in January 1925 and died in Moscow that October, at 40, during surgery for a stomach ulcer.
The Yervantunis Were the First of Armenia’s Three Royal Dynasties
The Yervantunis, written Yervanduni in Eastern Armenian and known in Western scholarship as the Orontids, held Armenia as satraps under the Achaemenid Empire and ruled it as kings from 321 BC until roughly 200 BC. The house can be traced to at least 400 BC, when Orontes I governed as satrap, and some historians place its origins in the late 6th century BC.
They were the first of the three dynasties that ruled the ancient Kingdom of Armenia, followed by the Artaxiads and the Arsacids, and Armavir served as the capital of their kingdom.
Metakse Ran a Writers’ Union Committee for Artsakh Fighters
Metakse Poghosyan was born in 1926 in the village of Arevshat in what is now Shirak Province. She graduated from the Khachatur Abovian Pedagogical Institute in Yerevan in 1952 and the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow in 1958, and joined the Writers’ Union of Armenia in 1963.
She wrote more than 30 books of poetry, prose and children’s literature, among them the 1995 poem “Shamiram,” and translated Bella Akhmadulina, Tudor Arghezi and Miroslav Válek into Armenian. Her poem “Gaghtnik chi mnum” appeared in an anthology of women poets published in the United States in 1990.
After the 1988 Spitak earthquake she helped organize relief in Gyumri and Spitak, including aid for orphaned children, and served as deputy chair of the Mayrutyun Fund from 1989 to 1991. From 1992 to 1995 she formed and chaired a committee inside the Writers’ Union to assist Artsakh freedom fighters and support soldiers and their families, and she later wrote the memoir “How I Saw Artsakh.”
She received the Movses Khorenatsi Medal in 2008 and the Order of St. Sahak and St. Mesrop from the Armenian Apostolic Church in 2011, and died in Yerevan on August 10, 2014.
The petition to name the street after her was submitted by her daughter, the poet Lilit Aghagulyan. The street takes her name in the year of her centenary, which the National Library of Armenia marked with an exhibition on May 11.
The Council Has Been Working Through Soviet Names All Year
In March the council named a stretch of road in the Hrazdan Gorge after the footballer and coach Nikita Simonyan and a street in Ajapnyak after the composer Khachatur Avetisyan.
In April it took up a package covering 10 streets and road sections, among them Titigradyan Street in Erebuni, which became Podgorica Street. In June it renamed Amiryan Street, named for the Bolshevik Arsen Amiryan, one of the 26 Baku Commissars, after the 4th-century King Pap.
