Les hayrēns arméniens comparés aux albas des troubadours occitans (The Armenian Hayrens Compared with the Albas of the Occitan Troubadours)
The hayrens, Armenian poetic couplets in a popular style, were attributed to Nahapet Kuchak by their first publisher in 1882, but as Manuk Abeghyan recognized they are in reality anonymous folk works, or the work of authors whose names were lost. Kuchak is therefore not the author but the heir to a line of bards and itinerant singers who transmitted them across generations. The authors show that certain hayren types resemble the albas of the French and Occitan troubadours, which stage lovers forced to part at dawn. Where the troubadours blame social etiquette, the hayrens instead blame the dawn itself, the birds, or the crowing of the cock.