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Iris Vardana is a flower named after the Armenian doctor who founded the first clinic in the holy city of Nazareth Kalust Vardan was born in 1835 in Constantinople, in an Armenian tailor family. Thanks to his good education and knowledge of English in the ranks of the English army, he served as a translator. The young Armenian was greatly affected by what was seen during the war, and he decided to devote himself to medicine. Not long ago, Kalust traveled to Scotland, where he attended courses from the Medical Missionary Society of Edinburgh, which also trained medical missionaries. Having completed his training, a young Armenian in 1861 was sent to Syria in order to help local Christians, many of whom were Armenians, and then with the same mission he went to Lebanon. The name of the Armenian missionary doctor is inseparable to the sacred city of Nazareth, which at this period of history was a part of the Ottoman Empire. Having moved to Nazareth in the 1860s, Kalust Vardan in the old market area of the city, which gradually turned it into a clinic with an operating room and patient wards. The medical activities of the Armenian quickly brought him universal recognition in Nazareth, where almost every resident was a patient of an Armenian doctor. Due to the need to expand the clinic in 1906, Kalust Vardan acquired land in the sacred city. Subsequently, the hospital they built for many years was the only European clinic between Jerusalem in the south and Beirut in the north. The name of the Armenian doctor is also associated with the discovery of a new type of iris flower. Kalust Vardan was a naturalist. In 1883, while walking around Nazareth, he discovered a previously unknown species of iris. Then the Armenian doctor sent a few bulbs of the flower to the famous botanist and iris specialist from Cambridge (England) Michael Foster. A year later the Nazareth irises bloomed in the Cambridge Botanical Garden, and in honor of the first discoverer, Foster called this species of flower "Iris Vardanai" ("Iris Vartanii").