Four rooms of a seven room apartment in Tbilisi where Armenia’s “national poet” Hovhannes Tumanyan once resided is to be sold by the family given the property by the Georgian government in the 1990s.

Archil Lezhav, the son of a wealthy Georgian businessman, says he will sell the place to a Georgian company called Georgia Touran to pay for his father’s surgical bills.

At a press conference today in Yerevan, Irma Safrazbekyan, a granddaughter of Tumanyan, lamented the fact that Armenians never purchased the home when it had the chance.

“My husband and I met with Lezhav senior in 2004. He was a pleasant man and said that he knew of Hovhannes Tumanyan and felt it improper to change anything in the apartment. He offered to sell the place for $25,000. At the time, the Armenian government argued it didn’t have the money,” Safrazbekyan told reporters.

Concerned about the looming sale, the Armenian government has sent a delegation to Tbilisi for negotiations with Lezhav’s son.

The delegation will be headed by the Levon Ananyan, President of the Writers Union of Armenia.

Ananyan noted that the market price for the 120 square meter apartment is around $70,000.

Yesterday, employees of Georgia Touran visited Alyona Tumanyan, the poet’s great granddaughter who owns the other three rooms and proposed that she sell them to the company as well. She refused.

Alyona Tumanyan told Irma Safrazbekyan that she would only sell the three rooms if Lezhava agreed to transfer his four rooms to the Armenian community as a cultural center.

Writer and literature expert Hovik Charkhchyan told reporters that he wasn’t hopeful of a positive outcome from the delegation’s visit.

“The bitter experience of the past leads one to believe that we will lose the Tumanyan home for all times. It won’t matter who purchased it or for what purpose,” he said.