Vartan Pasha

Vartan Pasha
Born	Hovsep Vartanian 1813
Died	1879 (aged 65–66)
Nationality	Ottoman Armenian
Occupation(s)	statesman, author, and journalist

Hovsep Vartanian (Armenian: Յովսէփ Վարդանեան), better known as Vartan Pasha (Armenian: Վարդան փաշա; 1813 – 1879), was an Ottoman Armenian statesman, author, and journalist of the 19th century, promoted to the rank of pasha after three decades in the service of the state. He is also notable for his novel "Akabi's Story" (Akabi Hikâyesi), published in 1851 in Turkish written in the Armenian script (a not unusual practice in the 19th century), and for having published the bilingual magazine Mecmua-i Havadis, an important reference in the history of the Turkish written press.

His novel is, according to the Austrian Turkologist Andreas Tietze who re-edited it and had a transcription published in 1991, the first genuine novel published in Turkey or, according to another viewpoint, "one of the five early, contemporaneous and intermediate works of fiction that were clearly distinct from earlier prose traditions in both Divan and folk literature, and that approximate novelistic form."^[1]

The question of which was the first Turkish novel is still debated. The first Turkish novel has often been considered to be Sami Frashëri's "Love affair between Talat and Fitnat" (Ta'aşşuk-ı Tal'at ve Fitnat), published in 1872. On the other hand, although written in Turkish, Vartan Pasha's "Akabi's Story", because of its fully Armenian context, can also be considered as the first Armenian novel that saw print (Khachatur Abovian's Wounds of Armenia having been published in 1858).^{[citation needed]}

Biography

Hovsep Vartanian (