The granddaughter of MP Perchuhi Barseghyan has been elected the new mayor of Strasbourg

French-Armenian Zhanna Barseghyan has been elected mayor of Strasbourg, the Armenian National Committee of Europe reports. With 42.5% of the vote, the French Green Party candidate is leading.

Zhanna Barseghyan is 40 years old. She is leading the list of France’s “Europe, Ecology, Greens” party in the elections.

As a candidate of the Green Party, Barseghyan considers the struggle against climate and inequality to be her primary task.

Zhannan Barseghyan is the granddaughter of Perchuhi Barseghyan, one of the first three women elected to the RA Parliament during the First Republic of Armenia in 1918.

Perchuhi Partizpanyan-Barseghyan (1886-1940)

Member of the Parliament of the First Republic (1919-1920), public figure, pedagogue, writer.

Perchuhi Partizpanyan was born in 1886 in Edirne. She graduated from high school in the Philpe (now Plovdiv). At the age of 16, she met her future husband, revolutionary Sargis Barseghyan, on whose advice she formed a girls’ club with the aim of spreading enlightenment and revolutionary ideas. She went to Geneva to study literature and pedagogy. She created under the pseudonym “Etna”. Partizpanyan’s stories are summarized in the “Storm End” collection.

After graduating, she taught in Kerasun, Van. In 1909 he married Sargis Barseghyan, and in 1915 Sargis, who ran the affairs of the ARF Dashnaktsutyun bureau in Constantinople, was arrested and martyred along with hundreds of Armenian intellectuals.

Perchuhi dedicated her future life to her child and to serving people. She moved to Bulgaria, then to Tbilissi (Georgia), and after the proclamation of the First Republic of Armenia, she returned to Yerevan and was elected a Member of Parliament of the First Republic of Armenia. Included in the American Board of Trustees.

After the fall of the First Republic, she left for Bulgaria, then moved to France, where she headed the Nansen office and continued her literary activities. Perchuhi Partizpanyan died in 1940 after a long illness.

Her book “Enraged days”, published in Boston’s Homeland journal in  1938-39, in which she completed the memories of life in Constantinople and the Genocide, was particularly highly assessed by literary critics. The book was later republished in French in 2004, translated by the author’s son, with the help of his grandchildren and then, on the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, it was put on the table of the Armenian reader by the efforts of national figure, writer Hakob Palyan: “”This is a great encyclopedia with which you can live the horror of those days, the courage of Armenian women. She was able to create the world of the real and the unreal, weaving all this together according to the sacred laws of art.”