Yeghishe Rostomiants and his family emigrated to Harbin from Vladivostok, where evidently his church was closed.
According to the 5th century Armenian historian Yeghishe Vardapet, in the year 450 the Sassanid King of Persia King Yazdegerd II ordered the highest nobles in Caucasian Albania, Armenia, and Georgia to come to his capital in Ctesiphon for the purpose of compelling their conversion to Zoroastrianism.
Yeghishe Charents was born Yeghishe Abgari Soghomonyan in Kars (Eastern Amenia, then a part of the Russian Empire) in 1897 to a family involved in the rug trade.