The most celebrated woman fighter of the Armenian resistance — she took up arms beside Serob Aghbyur in Sassoun, was wounded in the battle that killed him, and became Mother Sose to an entire nation.
Sose Vartanian (1868–1953), known forever as Sose Mayrig — Mother Sose — was the most celebrated woman fedayi of the Armenian liberation movement: a fighter who took up arms beside her husband, the legendary commander Serob Aghbyur, in the mountains of Sassoun.
Born in the village of Sokhord, she married Serob and joined his armed band as a full combatant, fighting Ottoman forces in the 1890s during the era of the Hamidian massacres. In the 1899 battle in which Serob was betrayed and killed, Sose fought on, was wounded, and lost not only her husband but her sons to the struggle.
She survived capture, exile, and the destruction of everything she had defended, eventually settling in Alexandria, Egypt, where the Armenian community cared for her as a living relic of the resistance until her death in 1953. Her remains were later reburied in Armenia at Yerablur military cemetery — a mother of the nation come home.
They called her Mayrig — Mother — because she fought for every Armenian child as if they were her own.
— On Sose MayrigSose Mayrig is the archetype of the Armenian woman warrior — invoked in songs, honored in monuments, her name given to daughters across the diaspora. Beside Serob Aghbyur in memory as in battle, she stands for the women who did not watch the struggle, but fought it.
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