Agop Ayvaz

Agop Ayvaz — Biography

Agop Ayvaz (Hagop Ayvaz) was an Armenian-Turkish theater artist, writer and publisher, born on April 2, 1911, in the Yenikapı quarter of Istanbul. After schooling at the Levon Vartuhyan and Esayan institutions, he entered the theater world in the late 1920s through the Arevelyan Taferahump (Oriental Theatre), led by Krikor Hagopyan, making his stage debut in 1928 in an Armenian operetta. He wrote his first play in 1932; since Armenian-language plays were banned at the time, he initially wrote it in Turkish, later publishing an Armenian version once the ban was lifted. From 1935 he wrote theater criticism for the newspaper Jamanak, and during World War II he was conscripted on more than one occasion, later also affected by the 1942 wealth tax imposed on Turkey's non-Muslim citizens.

In 1946 Ayvaz founded Kulis, the first Armenian-language theater magazine published in Turkey, and kept it in continuous publication for fifty years, until 1996. Alongside editing the magazine he continued to act and direct, chaired the theater committee of the Esayan High School Alumni Association from 1960, and founded his own amateur company, Pokr Taderahump (Small Theater). He married Arşaluys Balayan in 1937, with whom he had two children, Suzan and Garo, and died in Istanbul on September 29, 2006.