Ванигян Гегам

Ванигьян Гегам

Vanigian Kegham

Ваник

Vanig

Kegham Vanigian Гегам Ванигьян (Vanig) (Ваник)

Born in Van in 1889.

In 1910 Vanig was a law student in Constantinople when he, along with two other students, established a youth organisation to educate and prepare the new Armenian generation for the ranks of the Social Democrat Hunchakian Party, where they would help out fellow Armenians in need, anyway possible. Within a few months the organisation was publishing "Gaidz" and Vanig contributed to it as a member of the editorial staff and as columnist analysing ideological points pertaining to Armenians in Constantinople and Anatolia.

Vanig is credited for the "Gaidzian Generation", a generation of students, all educated on ideological and revolutionary issues, in turn this set the intellectual path of the Social Democrat Hunchakian Party chapters in Constantinople until the Genocide and throughout the world after the Genocide. Throughout the 20th century "Gaidz" Youth Organisation was and is an important Armenian youth movement in the United States:- Worcester, Providence, New York, Los Angeles and Fresno in particular.

On July 1914, Vanig was arrested by Turkish authorities along with a large group of other Hunchaks, 140 in all, of which 119 were released and 1 escaped.

On June 15, 1915 he was hanged in Bayazid square in Constantinople along with his close party friends and colleagues. Constantinople's Armenian community was ravaged by terror of April 24 at the time of the hanging of the "Twenty Hunchaks", Armenians were in no condition to retaliate, not even to protest the hanging. http://www.hunchak.org.au/aboutus/martyrs_kegham_vanigian.html