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A statue of prominent Armenian composer, priest, choir leader, singer, music ethnologist, music pedagogue and musicologist Komitas has been unveiled in the garden of the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul in Turkey, Arevelk newspaper reported. 

The statue was carved by famous Istanbul-Armenian painter and sculptor Erol Sarafyan. Philanthropist Sarkis Kulegec sponsored the initiative.

The statue of Komitas was erected on the occasion of his 150th birthday anniversary.

Bishop Sahak Mashalian, Locum Tenens of the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople presided over the ceremony.

On April 24, 1915, the day when the Armenian Genocide officially began, Komitas was arrested and put on a train the next day together with 180 other Armenian notables and sent to the city of Cankiri in northern Central Anatolia, at a distance of some 300 miles.

His good friend Turkish nationalist poet Mehmet Emin Yurdakul, the writer Halide Edip, and the U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau intervened with the government, and, by special orders from Talat Pasha, Komitas was dispatched back to the capital, but the nightmare he had experienced left a deep ineradicable impression on his soul. Komitas remained in seclusion from the outer world, absorbed in his gloomy and heavy thoughts – sad and broken.

In the autumn of 1916, he was taken to a hospital in Constantinople, Hôpital de la paix, and then moved to Paris in 1919, where he died in a psychiatric clinic in Villejuif in 1935. Next year, his ashes were transferred to Yerevan and buried in the Pantheon that was named after him.