Verjine Svazlian, ethnographer and folklorist, was born in 1934 in Alexandria (Egypt) in the family of the writer and public man Karnik Svazlian, himself an eye-witness survivor of Turkish tyranny.
In 1947, she has been repatriated with her parents to the Motherland, Armenia.
In 1956, she has graduated with honors from the Department of the Armenian Language and Literature of the Kh. Abovian State Pedagogical Institute.
Beginning from the nineteen fifties, she has, on her own initiative, started to write down and thereby saved from a total loss the various folklore creations communicated by the repatriates forcibly deported from Western Armenia, Cilicia and the Armenian-inhabited provinces of Anatolia, as well as the narrated memoirs of the eye-witness survivors of the
Genocide.
Starting from 1958, she has worked at the M. Abeghian Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of Armenia. During her post-graduate studies, she has been a M. Abeghian grant-aided student.
From 1961, she has worked at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia and, from 1996, also at the Museum-Institute of the Armenian Genocide of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia.
She has maintained her Candidate thesis in 1965 and her thesis for a Doctor's Degree in 1995.
She has participated in republican and international conferences, discoursing upon folklore, ethnography and the Armenian Action.
She is also the author of a number of scientific papers published in the Motherland and in the Diaspora.
VERJINE SVAZLIAN