Sarkozy Avetisian

Armenian Baby Named After French President

Satenik Vantsian 25.01.2012

A married couple in Armenia named their firstborn child after France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday in recognition of his role in the passage of a French law criminalizing the denial of the Armenian genocide.

The baby, named Sarkozy, was born in the second largest Armenian city of Gyumri. His father, Karapet Avetisian, said he followed the debate in the French Senate on Monday and decided to change the original choice of his incoming son’s name, Gevorg.

“On behalf of all Armenian people and myself, I thank Sarkozy for this step. And the name of my child is in his honor,” Avetisian told RFE/RL’s Armenian service (Azatutyun.am).

The director of a maternity hospital in Gyumri, Armen Isahakian, said the little Sarkozy was born at 2.30 pm Yerevan time and is a healthy child – the newborn weighs 3 kg (about 106 oz) and is 50 centimeters tall.

In a similar development, another Armenian couple named their newborn twin sons Jacques and Chirac in 2001, shortly after France officially recognized the 1915 mass killings of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey as genocide. Jacques Chirac was the French president at the time.