Armenia marks the 117th birth anniversary of great poet Yeghishe Charents March 13. Charents was born Yeghishe Abgari Soghomonyan in Kars in 1897 to a family involved in the rug trade. His family hailed from the Armenian diaspora of Maku, Persia. He first attended an Armenian elementary school, but later transferred to a Russian technical secondary school in Kars from 1908 to 1912. He spent much of his time in reading. In 1912, he had his first poem published in the Armenian periodical Patani (Tiflis). Amid the upheavals of the First World War and the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire, he volunteered to fight in a detachment in 1915 for the Caucasian Front.