Solar Energy Prophet Ciamician is Armenian

Giacomo Luigi Ciamician

Concern with solar and other forms of alternative energy, global climate change, and myriad environmental problems have recently proliferated in the media. But Al Gore, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and others are not the first to advocate measures to mitigate the adverse effects of our actions on the environment. That priority belongs to Giacomo Luigi Ciamician (1857-1922), the Italian-Armenian chemist, several-time Nobel Prize nominee, Italian Senator for Life, and founder of photochemistry (reactions catalyzed by light), who researched and lobbied for solar energy in the early 1900s at the University of Bologna, where the 150th anniversary of his birth was celebrated.

His family claimed descent from Mikayel Ciamician [Chamchian], the great eighteenth-century Armenian historian. In 1850, Ciamician"s family moved from Constantinople (now Istanbul) to the thriving Armenian community of Trieste, where they had ties with one of the Mekhitarist bishops. This congregation of Roman Catholic Armenian monks contributed to the Renaissance of Armenian philology, literature, and culture early in the nineteenth century and published old Armenian-Christian manuscripts. Founded in 1701 in Constantinople (now Istanbul) by Mekhitar Bedrosian of Sivas (1676-1749), the order was expelled from Constantinople in 1703 and settled in 1717 on the island of San Lazzaro, Venice. Their community argued over a revised constitution by Abbot Stephen Melkonian, and in 1772 a group of dissidents left Venice for Trieste.

The Ciamician family was fortunate by moving to Trieste. They avoided extermination during the persecutions of Armenians by the crumbling Ottoman Empire, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and culminating in the first genocide of the twentieth century. Thus Giacomo Ciamician, who was a century ahead of his time, lived to become the father of solar energy.