Rouben Galichian

Rouben Galichian (Galchian) was born in Tabriz, Iran, to a family of immigrant Armenians who had fled Van in 1915, escaping the Genocide and arriving in Iran via Armenia, Georgia and France.  After attending school in Tehran, Rouben received a scholarship to study in the UK and graduated with a First Class Honours degree in Electronics Engineering from the University of Aston in Birmingham in 1963.

Sine 1960s he has been active in Iran and later in Britain in various Armenian cultural organizations, at the same time being more and more involved in his hobby, cartography. In 1980 he moved to London with his family, where he had access to extensive cartographic material in the British and European libraries.

In London he has been active and leading Armenian organizations such as The Institute of Armenian Music (1975-79), Aid Armenia (1988-2019), Friends of Armenia (since 2000), Head of the Executive of the Armenian Community of Britain and Hamazgayin. He was instrumental in the establishment of the first Armenian Embassy, which was in London, where he was the Honourary Consul for eight years.

In 2007, in memory of their son Levon, he and his wife established an arts and crafts school in the village of Myasnikyan, near Armevir, where school children learn various crafts after school hours.

  Rouben’s interest in geography and cartography started in early life, but he began seriously studying the subject in 1970s. His first book entitled Historic Maps of Armenia: The Cartographic Heritage was published in 2004, followed by its Russian and Armenian translations in 2005. Since then he has published over twenty books on cartographic and ethno-cultural subjects in Armenian, Englsih, Russian and Persian, one of which was published in Turkish in Istanbul.

For his services to Armenian historical cartography Rouben was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia in 2008, and in 2013 he was the recipient of the Movses Khorenatsi Presidential Medal for outstanding achievements in the sphere of culture.