Margarita Darbinyan

Margarita Darbinyan-Melikyan (; 18 March 1920 – 9 March 2021) was an Armenian historian and translator.

Biography

Margarita Darbinyan was born on March 18, 1920, in Batum, Georgian SSR. Her father was an Armenian Catholic, and her mother a Polish Catholic. Both of her parents knew Russian, but neither spoke each other's native languages of Armenian and Polish. Margarita was raised speaking Russian at home, learning Armenian through Classical Armenian. In 1941, Margarita Darbinyan graduated from the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. Returning to Armenia, she was appointed to work in Chibukhlu (now Tsovagyugh). In 1951, she began teaching at the Yerevan Institute of Russian and Foreign Languages, becoming a senior researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies in 1958, and at Matenadaran in 1959.

Margarita studied and translated the primary sources of Armenian historiography from Classical Armenian into Russian and made references. She compiled the original text of Tovma Artsruni's book History of the House of Artsruni and wrote the foreword and references. She made translations into Armenian from several languages including Persian, German, English, French, Italian, and Arabic.

Darbinyan died in Yerevan on 9 March 2021, aged 100.