Garegin Srvandztiants publishes 'David of Sassoun' (Sasuntsi Davit), collecting oral folk verses from Armenian peasant gusans (bard-singers) around Lake Van, Mush, and Sasun mountains. The epic blends Christian resistance against Arab caliphs, pre-Christian Mithraic folklore, dragon-slaying legends (vishaps), and nature spirit beliefs, using decasyllabic meter and formulaic repetition. The work preserves material from the 9th-10th centuries.

The Sasuntsi Davit epic became the cornerstone of modern Armenian poetry, influencing Hovhannes Tumanyan's narrative poems and Yeghishe Charents's revolutionary-folk synthesis. The epic's folk prosody—with its inherited formulaic phrases and epithets—provided a model for reclaiming Armenian poetics after the genocide (1915). It demonstrates how oral heroic folklore, collected from threatened dialects, generates national epic traditions that serve as linguistic resistance literature in diaspora contexts.