... Haroutioun Bezjian (1771-1834) was one of the remarkable characters of Mahmoud's reign.  The son of an emigrant from Kars, he was born to poverty and obscurity, and had received but a rudimentary education in the patriarchal academy when at the age of twelve years he entered the employ of a silk-dealer as errand-boy.  Yet by dint of personal worth and native talent and with the help of the Duzians whom he first served and later (1810) succeeded in the imperial mint, he climbed up in the social and civic scale until he attained to the highest place ever given by an Ottoman ruler to one of Christian birth... Sultan Mahmoud esteemed him as one of his wisest counselors... (The Armenian Awakening, Arpee, 1909).