On April 24, 1915, said to be the day when Armenian Genocide officially began, he was arrested. The next day he was put on a train with 180 other Armenian notables and sent to the city of Çankırı in northern Central Anatolia, at a distance of some 300 miles. His good friend, Turkish nationalist poet Emin Yurdakul, the authoress Halide Edip, and the U.S. ambassador Henry Morgenthau intervened with the government and, by special orders from Talat Pasha, Komitas was sent back to the capital. In autumn 1916, he was taken to a Turkish military hospital and he moved to Paris in 1919 where he died in a psychiatric clinic "Villejuif" in 1935. Next year his ashes were transferred to Yerevan and buried in the Pantheon. 