Ivan Aivazovsky was a celebrated Armenian painter famous in Imperial Russia and Ottoman Turkey. Born July 29, 1817; he protested the cruel massacres by Sultan Hamid II in 1895 by throwing his Ottoman medals into the sea. He is buried in Sourp Sarkis Armenian Church. Interestingly, Turks claim Aivazovsky as one of their own, an insinuation of the integral Armenian ethnos in modern Turkey.