Ovnatan Nagash

Born 1661 in the village of Shorot, Agulis region; died there 1722. Armenian poet and artist (nagash means “painter” in Persian).

Ovnatan Nagash lived in Tbilisi and Yerevan and traveled extensively. He was a notable writer of late medieval secular lyric poetry, close to the folk poetry of the ashugs (folk singers and storytellers). In his ironic, Anacreontic, and didactic songs and in his love poems, he emerges as a poet and lover of life with an excellent knowledge of the way of life and psychology of his people. He painted the frescoes in the Echmiadzin Cathedral.