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Today, April 14, marks the 107th birthday anniversary of prominent Armenian poet and translator Hamo Sahyan (also known as Hmayak Grigoryan).

The poet was born in 1914 in the village of Lor in Armenia’s Syunik Province. In 1939 Sahyan graduated from the Baku Pedagogical Institute. In 1941 he returned to Yerevan and then served in the Soviet Navy during World War II.

He worked at "Avangard" and "Vozni" newspapers, later serving as editor in chief of "Grakan Tert". The first collection of his poems was published in 1946. Sahyan was awarded with the State Prize of Armenia for his "Sezam, Batsvir" (Open Sesame) (1972) book.

In lyric poetry Sahyan was a perfect landscape painter. In homeland nature he noticed colors and patterns which were not seen by anybody before; he heard mystic whispers and melodies. The nature for him was not only a source of self-identification and world understanding, but also a mean of understanding human soul. The poet becomes a connecting link between nature and people and feels himself as a part of the nature.

Sahyan died on July 17 in 1993 and was buried at Komitas Pantheon in Yerevan.