Hayganuş Mark

[5] She adopted the family name "Mark", the short form of "Markar," following the enactment of the Surname Law in Turkey in 1934.

She took Armenian language lessons for five years from linguist Hagop Kurken, whose attention she had attracted during her final grade in the high school.

She was not even twenty years of age when she was awarded second place in a poetry competition organized by the newspaper Masis.

[6] In 1905, Mark started to edit the Constantinople-based women’s Armenian magazine Dzaghig ("Flower").

In the meantime, she married Vahan Toshigyan, editorial director of the periodical Manzûme-i Efkâr, and quit her job at the orphanage.

The periodical continued to be published for another two years, but ended when Mark moved with her husband to Smyrna.

Mark became the head of the Literary Commission of the recently-founded "Nationalist Armenian Women's Union".

While nobody responded to that, Mark sharply criticized it in the daily Hilal-ı Ahmer ("Red Crescent") with the words "mothers lost their lives during childbirth, and women also serve as a nurse on the battlefields".