Hometown History #79: Camp Haiastan’s Hero

Kerekin Nejdeh (also styled Garegin Nzhdeh) is the Armenian patriot and leader honored with a life-size bust at the center of Franklin’s Armenian Youth Federation (AYF) Camp Haiastan, located between Summer Street and Uncas Pond.

The inscription on the base that supports the bust reads, “Armenian Patriot Who Died for the Cause of Freedom” – indeed in a poll in Armenia in 2010, he was voted the most important Armenian in history.

Born in 1886 as Kerekin Ter-Harutyunyan, the Nejdeh moniker was a nom de guerre adopted by a man who was ever fighting for a national homeland amidst the rise and fall of neighboring empires.

According to Wikipedia, Kerekin was educated at St. Petersburg in the Russian empire, and as a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, he was involved in the national liberation struggle and revolutionary activities during the First Balkan War and World War I and became one of the key political and military leaders of the First Republic of Armenia (1918–1921). He is widely admired as a charismatic national hero by Armenians.

In 1921, he became a key figure in the establishment of the Republic of Mountainous Armenia, an anti-Bolshevik state that became a key factor that led to the inclusion of the province of Syunik into Soviet Armenia.

In the 1930s, he also made multiple stays in the US and in 1933 was influential in establishing the AYF itself (he is pictured in Boston in the  image below).

He later supported the Armenian Legion, which fought against the Soviet Union during World War II.

After that, perhaps unsurprisingly, he ended his days in a Soviet prison, dying in 1955.

His post mortem life was nearly as peripatetic, having been buried three times and his hand given a separate ceremonial interment.

But in Franklin, his likeness still stares proudly toward a better future.