Madteos Mamourian (Smyrna/Izmir 1830 – 1901), Ottoman Armenian educator, writer, translator and newspaper editor, moved with his family to the Aegean island of Syros and later (in the late 1830s) to Alexandria. In both places young Mamourian attended Greek schools; he was literate only in Greek until the age of thirteen. In 1843, his parents sent him back to Smyrna to attend the city’s Armenian school and to gain literacy in Armenian. After graduating in 1845, Mamourian travelled to Paris to finish his education at the school of the Armenian Catholic Mekhitarist Congregation. After returning to his native city in 1850 and co-founding a short-lived Armenian school there, he moved to Constantinople in 1853, where he became director of a prestigious Armenian school. During his tenure as director, the Crimean War broke out and Mamourian worked briefly as an interpreter for an Ottoman regiment under British command.

In 1856-58, Mamourian accompanied a wealthy Armenian financier as personal secretary to London, Paris, and Saint Petersburg. This European tour helped shape his creative output. It was during this period that he began writing his first novel, Ankliakan namakani, kam hayu me chakatagire (“English letters, or The destiny of an Armenian”). This epistolary novel, partially serialized then published in book form in 1880, is written from the perspectives of two Englishmen and explores, among other themes, issues of national consciousness and the formation of a modern political subject. Along with his close friend Hovsep Shishmanian (ps. Dzerents) and the Eastern Armenian writer Hakob Melik Hakobian (ps. Raffi), Mamourian was one of the few Armenian practitioners of the Romantic novel.

From 1861 to 1865, Mamourian worked as the head of the records office at the Armenian Apostolic Patriarchate of Constantinople. In this position, he drafted official documents for the institution and had an unobstructed view of the inner workings of Armenian communal affairs in the capital. This vantage point gave him material for a series of articles in the Ottoman Armenian periodical press, to which he was a frequent contributor. These pieces, written as letters, were later collected and published in 1872 as Haykakan namakani (“Armenian letters”) under his pen name Vruyr. The letters address a variety of socio-political issues relating to Armenians in the Ottoman capital in the mid-1860s, particularly the debates surrounding the Armenian National Constitution and its first years in effect.

In 1868, Mamourian, having returned to Smyrna, assumed the directorship of the Armenian school he had attended as a boy as well as its sister school for Armenian girls. He served in these roles for nearly twenty years, from 1868 to 1878 and again from 1880 to 1889. During this time, he reorganized their curricula, oversaw instruction and produced a series of text books for use in his schools and elsewhere. In addition to penning his own primers for young readers and history textbooks for more advanced students, Mamourian also translated educational materials from French and English. Often republished in the 1880s and 1890s, his work was an integral part of a larger reform of pedagogical methods in Ottoman Armenian education during this period.

Mamourian is best remembered as a prolific literary translator and newspaper editor. He first began publishing his literary translations in the 1850s in Garabed Utujian’s newspaper Masis. In the 1860s and 1870s, he often translated long, multi-volume works from English and French and is credited with enriching modern Armenian with literary terminology as well with helping to expand the Ottoman Armenian reading public. Among his literary translations figure Eugène Sue’s Les mystères de Paris (1868-70), Antoine Galland’s version of the Arabian Nights (1870-71), Alexandre Dumas’s Les trois mousquetaires (1871-72), Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1872-73) and Jules Verne’s Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1875). At the height of his literary translation work in the early 1870s, Mamourian began writing a historical novel entitled Sew lerin marde (“The man on the black mountain”). This novel, which was never finished, follows the life of an Armenian during the Russo-Persian War in the 1820s and was serialized between 1871 and 1881 in Mamourian’s long-running journal Arewelean Mamul (“Eastern press”). Founded in Smyrna in 1871, this journal included a wide range of pieces on Armenian social, cultural, literary and political life in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Mamourian edited the journal for thirty years until his death in 1901, often penning pieces in it under the pseudonym Shahnur. Mamourian’s journal along with the publishing house he founded in 1883 were continued – with interruptions – by his son, Hrant, until the destruction of Armenian life in Smyrna in 1922.