Hakob Melik Hakobian (Pekajik nr Salmas, present-day Iran 1835 – Tbilisi 1888), better known by his pen name Raffi, was born into a wealthy merchant family in the north-west of Qajar Persia, and schooled at the local Church school and Tbilisi, where he learned Russian and the standard Eastern Armenian dialect. Returning to his native area in 1856, he was confronted with the cleavage between his urban education and local clerical traditionalism.

Raffi was a productive writer. His historical novels, which include Harem (1874), Jalaleddin (1878), Khent’ë (“The fool”, 1880), Xačagoġi Hišatakaran (“The memoirs of a cross-stealer”, 1883), Kajçer (“Sparks”, 1883-4), and Samvel (“Samuel”, 1886), thematize the glorious times of the ancient Armenian kingdoms, the Christian-Pagan wars, Armenians’ oppression by the Iranian and Ottoman empires, and the 1877 Russo-Ottoman War. They were explicitly intended to raise literacy and promote Armenian national feeling. Davit Bek (1882), celebrating an 18th-century military leader, was later remade into a film (1944) and an opera (by Armen Tigranian, 1950). Other writings include poetry, short stories, letters, and political essays. He addressed letters to the religious leader Bishop Mkrtič Xrimian (1820–1907), then editor of the Istanbul-based journal Artsiv Vaspurakan (“The eagle of Vaspurakan”, 1855-74), and contributed to Stepanos Nazarian’s Hiusisapayl (“Northern lights”, 1858-64) and Grigor Artsruni’s Mshak (“The tiller”, 1872-1920). Some of these articles were compiled into a collection entitled Tačkahayk’ (“The Armenian question”, 1895).

Politically, Raffi was concerned with Armenian women’s right to education, the unity of all Armenians despite their denominational differences (Apostolic, Catholic, Protestant, or Muslim), and, after his first visit to the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire (1857), the Armenians’ plight under Ottoman rule and amidst Kurdish tribes. He died in Tbilisi (where he had settled in 1880) in 1888.