On Bratya Miladinovi Street in Ruse, two buildings face each other across the road. At number 18 stands the Armenian Apostolic Church of the Holy Mother of God. At number 37, directly opposite, stands a four-storey building — empty and locked today. A few steps separate them. And nearly a century and a half of shared history.
In that empty building was the Armenian school.
One School, Two Names
The older members of our community call it by two names — “Surp Mesrob Mashtots” (Saint Mesrob Mashtots) and “Mesrobian”. They sound like two different schools. They are one and the same.
“Surp” means “Saint”. And Mesrob Mashtots was the monk who, in 405 AD, sat down and devised an alphabet for his people — thirty-six letters with which Armenian survived where other tongues had melted into the languages around them. “Mesrobian” is the everyday, familiar form of the same name — “Mesrob’s”, “of Mesrob” — with that suffix -ian carried by so many Armenian family names.
Both names, then, are Armenian: one the solemn name of the patron saint, the other the word the children spoke every morning on their way to class.
A school in a foreign land, named after the man who gave its people their letters. It would be hard to say more plainly what it was for.
One Teacher’s Chronicle
The history of this school rests largely on one person — the teacher Violeta Metoyan.
She kept its chronicle: an ordinary notebook in which, year after year, she wrote down what happened. Her entries run from the nineteenth century all the way to 1961. Today the notebook is held in the State Archive in Ruse — where it was found by the historian Hachik Lebikyan while he was gathering material for his book The Armenian Community in Ruse from the Seventeenth Century to 2022.
Without that notebook we would know only that the school had existed. Because of it, we know how it existed.
What Actually Happened After 1944
You will often hear that the Armenian school in Ruse was shut down immediately after 9 September 1944. The documents tell a different story.
The study by Yura Konstantinova and Ivaylo Nachev on the Armenian community in socialist Bulgaria shows that after 1944 Armenian schools across the country kept working — in eleven towns and cities, with some 1,000 children in all. Their closure came later and gradually, as part of the new regime’s policy towards minorities.
For Ruse we also have direct evidence. Lebikyan’s book reproduces an archive photograph of fourth-form pupils, taken in 1956. And Metoyan’s chronicle runs to 1961.
The difference is not a small one. Between 1944 and the early 1960s a whole generation of children studied Armenian in that building. They are in their eighties today — and they are among us. Had we accepted the convenient date, we would have struck their school years out with a single stroke.
The New Building
In 1967–1968 a new building rose on the site of the old Armenian school. At first it carried only a number — Primary School No. 12. Later it was given a name: Peyo Yavorov Primary School. But it remained what the place had always been — a school.
A small but lovely detail: the old building goes, and the purpose of the place stays. Children keep walking through the same gate, opposite the same church — only now in Bulgarian.
The End
Peyo Yavorov Primary School was closed by order of the Minister of Education on 14 May 2008. For the simple, familiar reason of our times — too few pupils.
The building passed to Angel Kanchev Primary School, but in 2015 that school too gave it up. In 2021 two Ruse community centres applied to rent the second and third floors and turn them into an educational centre.
And so the place across from the church was a school from the nineteenth century until 2008 — through three names, two alphabets and several forms of government. Nearly a century and a half, without a break.
A Request to Our Readers
This history has one gap we cannot fill on our own: photographs.
The archives and the internet hold almost no images of the Armenian school in Ruse. But the drawers and albums of Ruse’s Armenian families certainly do — class photographs, school celebrations, teachers, the yard across from the church.
If you have such a photograph, or if you studied here and remember names and events, please get in touch. We will scan them, return them to you, and keep them — together with the name of the person who gave them.
Write to us at info@armenian-church.com or through our contact page.
A school lives on for as long as there is someone left to speak of it.
Sources
- Hachik Lebikyan, The Armenian Community in Ruse from the Seventeenth Century to 2022, 2022 — published with the support of Ruse Municipality and the Armenian General Benevolent Union “Parekordzagan”. Contains a chapter on the Mesrobian Primary School and the archive photograph of 1956.
- The school chronicle kept by the teacher Violeta Metoyan (nineteenth century – 1961). State Archive, Ruse.
- Yura Konstantinova and Ivaylo Nachev, The Armenian Community in Socialist Bulgaria between Repatriation and the American Dream, Fakel, 2019.
- Decision of Ruse Municipal Council of 20 May 2021 concerning the building of the former Peyo Yavorov Primary School, 37 Bratya Miladinovi Street.
The account of the new building’s construction in 1967–1968 rests on the recollections of members of the Ruse Armenian community. If you hold a document that confirms or refines it, we should be glad to add it.