Jerewan – Buchpräsentation & Gespräch

Yerevan – Book Presentation & Discussion
Mkrtich Armen – A Literary Rediscovery

What remains of a city when you set out to reinvent it?

Yerevan in the 1920s: The young Soviet capital is to be surveyed, rebuilt, and modernized. Old neighborhoods, winding alleys, gardens, and mud-brick houses were to make way for a new metropolis. In the midst of this upheaval, architect Arshak Budaryan returned from Leningrad—and was faced with a question that remains relevant to this day: Must progress eliminate the old, or can the new emerge from memory?

Mkrtich Armen’s novel “Yerevan” was published in 1931, banned shortly thereafter, and fell into near oblivion for decades. In 2026, this extraordinary work is available for the first time in German translation.

Armen makes the city itself the protagonist. Streets, houses, courtyards, and memories almost begin to take on a life of their own. Dream and reality overlap; old Yerevan reappears once more in all its sounds, images, and stories—precisely at the moment when it threatens to disappear.

At the Armenian Cultural Days in Stuttgart, Susanna Yeghoyan, translator of the novel from Armenian, will present the book and speak about Mkrtich Armen, the novel’s distinctive language, and the challenge of making this multifaceted work accessible to a German-speaking audience for the first time.

A literary encounter with a city caught between memory and vision, preservation and renewal—and thus, at the same time, with one of the central questions of our present.

Featuring: Susanna Yeghoyan
Translator and Germanist

Saturday, October 24, 2026 · 11:00 a.m.
Welthaus Stuttgart e.V.
Charlottenplatz 17 · 70173 Stuttgart

An event organized by the Armenian Community of Baden-Württemberg e.V. in cooperation with Guggolz Verlag