I have seen the destruction of paradise

The fading

How was I supposed to rise and depart? Yet, I rose and departed.

This sentence lodged itself in my consciousness and remained there. It spun ceaselessly in my mind, groaning like an old millstone that, in its turning, crushed not kernels of wheat but my memories, transforming them into the fine dust of the past. That dust settled upon my present, suffocating all the colors of the future.

How does one tear oneself away from one’s own root? How does one abandon the soil whose every tree and bush one knows, and beneath whose every stone lie fragments of the life one has lived? A tree, when the wind rips it from its earth, no longer lives; it becomes withered wood. But we rose and departed. And our rising was a kind of death. Not the death of the body, but the death of the soul. The body could walk, move away and breathe, but my soul remained there…

Stepanakert, after the brutal war, was no longer our clean and vibrant city; it had become a temple of mourning and sorrow, a haven where desperate refugees arrived, having escaped by a thread from various regions of Artsakh. This time, Stepanakert had gathered the population of Artsakh not for a concert or a rally, but around a shared, universal pain. People submerged in grief and loss were spending their last hours in the homeland. Without food or clothing, bewildered in their uncertainty, they sought refuge under the open sky.

Where to go, what to do, from whom to expect help? Mother Armenia was silent, having declared that “the civilian population is not in danger.” The Russian peacekeepers never became true keepers of peace, and the world seemed to have closed its eyes — nothing was happening. No one came, no one heard the call of the Artsakh people, no one saw our despairing glances.

Refugees fleeing occupied areas of Artsakh reached Stepanakert

The air was thick with waiting. Azerbaijani bandits had cut off the roads leading to Artsakh’s other regions, severing us not merely from our villages, but from our past.

I never went to our house. The roads that for decades had always led me to its open gate were now closed before me. The house where I was born and grew up, where my life had passed, where I kept my dearest possessions, believing they were in the safest place. What a bitter irony of life. I would not be able to touch the walls of our house one last time — walls that held the memories of generations.

I would not be able to take a handful of soil from the graves of my relatives, so that at least their breath might be with me. I could not enter my room, breathe its air one last time — air filled with the scent of my books — and leave a piece of my soul there as an eternal guardian. I abandoned my home from afar, in my mind, without a final glance and that unspoken “farewell” became the heaviest cross of my life.

For nine months, we had been enclosed in a large coffin called a blockade, and all the doors leading to the past were nailed shut.

My reason refused to accept reality. My mind was obscured, creating a protective veil between me and the truth. I looked, but I did not see. I heard, but I did not grasp. I moved, I acted, but everything inside me was petrified. 

In those days, there was no time to think about ourselves. What was the talk of taking or saving anything when we were searching for human beings? Our days turned into a dark, endless road from the hospital to the morgue and back. We searched for faces — among the living, among the dead — praying to find them, and simultaneously praying not to find them, at least not there. We awaited the call from other family members, a message that they had safely reached Stepanakert, that great, wounded capital which had embraced all its children.

A lesson in humanity from an Artsakh child

One day, I went out into the street to offer a requiem to my city; I circled it on foot one last time. My city was unrecognizably changed. It resembled a wounded eagle, chest pierced but head still raised to the sky, proud. Everywhere were the scars of war — buildings struck by shells, which stared silently at the sky through their shattered windows and seemed to whisper curses. The streets had become the deck of a wrecked ship of life. Human destinies scattered everywhere: tattered clothes, broken objects, torn books whose pages the wind turned like an unfinished love story, a broken glass from which toasts to happiness were once drunk… And among these ruins wandered the people: tired, tormented refugees, searching for food and clothing, trying to survive in a place where life itself was already dying.

My final stop, my Golgotha, was the mass graves. There, the earth no longer had time to receive its children. The earth? The earth had turned into a voracious monster, opening its jaw to mercilessly swallow not bodies, but our tomorrow, our future. I stood on the edge of that abyss and felt my soul tear itself from my body, falling like a heavy stone into the pit to be buried with them.

It was unbearable to see our heroic boys placed into holes — without farewell, without proper ceremony, without a mother’s lament. They became eternal guardians in the earth’s embrace and we, the living, became tombstones carrying their names and unlived lives.

Children promise Artsakh hero Ashot Ghulyan: “We will return.”

The blast from hell

When it seemed there was no more room for pain in our souls, on September 25, the sky ripped open and hell descended upon the earth. The explosion at the fuel depot shook Stepanakert. In an instant, hundreds of people burned alive and turned to ash; some could not even be gathered. Hundreds of victims and wounded in a country blockaded by the enemy. In a country with no medicine to ease human pain. In my country, people were burning alive.

No, that scene cannot be described with words. Words belong to the human world, and this was no longer one. Writers who have written about hell would burn their works as naive fairy tales had they witnessed its reality.

Hospitals, already filled with war wounded, opened their doors to hundreds more — unrecognizable, burned, howling in pain. The corridors filled not with bodies, but with pieces of flesh pleading for help. And how to help? With what? For doctors, not going mad was a superhuman trial.

Then, the most horrific part began: the identifications. Someone recognized a relative’s wedding ring, fused into a piece of melted flesh. Another, the remnant of a chain they had once gifted to their wife. The faceless tragedy became personal hell. Entire families had burned — fathers, mothers, children.

Come, wise priest, explain God’s justice. Come, preach forgiveness when you see charred hands clutching one another until the end. In that moment, losing one’s mind would have been the only human reaction.

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But we did not lose our minds.

No, that grace was not granted to us. To go mad, one must feel until the end, and our senses had long been burned out. Do you know, it was the last, strangest manifestation of God’s mercy: our consciousness was obscured, creating a protective layer between us and reality.

We no longer asked, “Why?” or “What happened?” We simply saw the next calamity — the next wave of horror — and passed through it without grasping its depth. We had turned into robots, programmed to continue breathing, walking, acting. Our hands moved, our feet carried us, but inside us reigned a cold, cosmic emptiness. 

In those days, staying sane was the greatest inhumanity. And I thought: if the sinners in hell knew of our condition, they would consider their torments a heavenly bliss.

The road of exile

And then, came the hour of departure. 

An endless column of cars stretched out of the city, like a great, wounded snake.

An endless column of cars stretched out of the city

We were going — toward the unknown, more terrifying than the familiar hell. We did not know whether the Hakari Bridge led to salvation or the abyss.

We were going, not knowing where — not knowing if those who had gone before us had reached safety, or…

We were going, having never found our loved ones, leaving their fate in uncertainty.

We were going, hearing the groan of our land behind us, abandoned to the claws of beasts. We were going, betraying the boys whose fresh mounds of earth hadn’t yet cooled. We were going, but how, and why — we did not know. 

Why? What was the guilt of these people, these children, these boys? Why did people have to burn alive… Why…

I took nothing with me. My hands were powerless to lift the burden I truly wanted to carry. How can an entire life be collapsed into a car?

My impossible wish was to take our homeland — that wounded bird — into my hands, warm it and save it from the predators’ talons. 

But since I could not carry my roots, the foundation of my being, then what meaning was there in carrying the branches and the leaves? What material thing could you save in a world where human life had become the most worthless commodity? When human destinies were being spilled around you in the cruelest way, any object — be it gold or something else — lost its significance, its weight.

I did not even close the door of our house. I could not. That action would have been a death certificate signed by my own hand. To close the door would mean consciously severing the last, invisible thread that bound me to my past. It would mean admitting that this was a full stop, not a comma. And my soul, despite all its wounds, still rebelled against that full stop. It still refused to accept that the door that had always opened for me could one day close forever. I was deceiving myself that this was temporary, that we would still return.

36 hours. The longest and shortest hours of my life. Every second was worth a lifetime; these were my last hours in Artsakh. I looked out of the car window, devouring everything with my eyes. The night sky was so close, so familiar, as if you could reach out and stroke the stars. They burned with a unique, calm light, as if trying to say: “We will be here when you return.” And the outline of the Kashatagh mountains… That night, they were silent, but their silence was more eloquent than any lament. It was the silence of a father watching his departing child.

I tried to sculpt all this onto the walls of my consciousness, so that in the cold days of exile, I could return to it in my mind and warm myself with those memories.

Life and death danced together on that agonizing road. In the back seats, the breaths of the elderly and the sick were slowly fading, their final gaze clinging to the mountains. In the car beside us, the first, life-affirming cry of a newborn rang out — born on the dark, unknown road of exile. Were we being reborn, or were we dying on that road? Perhaps both at once.

The road of exile

Expulsion from paradise

And we reached our Jordan: the Hakari Bridge. But this was not the road to the Promised Land; it was the last gate of expulsion from paradise. We crossed not as victors, but as sons driven from our own land. Shame burned through us: shame for our powerlessness, shame for our retreat, shame for surviving. 

The boundary line was not drawn on a map. It was drawn straight through our hearts, tearing us from the other half of our being. I looked back one last time, straining to catch even a fragment of the homeland with my eyes. There was only darkness — a dense, lightless darkness that had swallowed Artsakh whole.

The cars crossed the bridge one by one, like a funeral procession. After crossing, they stopped. People stepped out. They turned and looked back. Then, one by one, the headlights went dark. Each extinguished light was hope extinguished.

We left our light there, with the land, and continued in darkness. The light of our life had already gone out. We were no longer living — we were existing. On that bridge, we died so that our bodies could continue moving.

Yes, we died there, on the Hakari Bridge. It was our Golgotha. What crossed to this side were not people, but bodies — empty vessels that still breathed and walked by force of habit. Our souls remained behind, captive.

And what to do with this mere existence? Rejoice that the body escaped hell, or mourn that the soul did not?

What is the meaning of survival if you are condemned to walk this world with a bowed head, waiting for the day your foot touches the soil that is yours?

After surviving the fire of the Apocalypse, there comes not relief, but sobriety. The cold, merciless pain of realization. When the fog of shock disperses, and you see the boundless desert of your loss. And from that moment our daily death begins.

We die every morning, not waking up in our home. We die every time we hear the name of our mountains. We die from the longing for home, which wears away the body like a physical pain. We die from the unbearable realization that our home exists, it breathes, but we are here, in exile. We die from the thought that our innocent victims, our heroic boys, are gone. 

And this daily death is a thousand times crueler than physical death because it has no end. It is an eternal sentence, where the executioner is your own memory.

The last laundry drying in Artsakh

The empty echo

In Armenia, two worlds collided: the world of life and the world of ghosts. 

Our compatriots greeted us with compassion, materialized in food and other supplies. There was sincere pain in their eyes, but also a tremendous chasm of incomprehension.

How could you explain to the compatriot who sheltered you that you feel more alien in their home than you did in the ruins of your own?

Because there, every stone belonged to you. Every fragment was memory. Here, even kindness feels foreign.

We smiled because gratitude was the only language we still shared. But that smile was not the voice of our soul. It was a reflex — a thin, fragile bridge stretched over an abyss between their generosity and our grief.

We became ghosts in human form, moving against the flow of life. We walked the streets of Yerevan, but between us and life there was an invisible, soundproof wall. The film of life was screened before our eyes: café laughter, lovers whispering, children running — but we watched this film without sound, without color. For us, it was merely a sequence of moving images that evoked no emotion.

Our only reality remained behind the mountains, and its voice was so loud within us that it drowned out everything else. We lived on the boundary of two worlds: our body was here, and our soul was there. And nowhere was there a home for us. Here we were strangers, and from there, we were uprooted.

The delusion of hope

Here, in this foreign familiarity, we live with a strange, unnamed disease. It is called “temporary.” Temporary shelter, temporary clothes, temporary life. The word “temporary” has become our only medicine — our prayer whispered before sleep, our consolation that keeps us from drowning in pain, our biggest and sweetest self-deception.

Clothes for the refugees

We cling to that word the way a passenger on a sinking ship clings to a piece of wood, hoping it will carry them ashore.

But days turn into weeks, weeks into months and our “temporary” begins to acquire the cold, terrifying features of permanence. The numbness of the initial shock passes, and in its place comes the sharp, burning pain of realization. This is worse than the fading. Realization stripped reality bare in all its horror.

We begin to understand that we did not simply leave — we were torn out. Our roots remain in that soil, and here we are like a drying tree, condemned to a slow death.

And with that realization, a question is born — one that becomes our air and water, our blessing and our curse: Will we return?

At first, this question is only a whisper, one we are afraid to utter aloud. It is heard only in narrow circles of Artsakh people when we gather over a cup of coffee. Soon, however, it becomes the core of our daily conversations, the meaning around which our existence turns. We split into two camps.

One part believes. They obsessively follow the news. In every international statement, every careless word of a politician, they search for signs of return. They speak of maps, negotiations, guarantees. They live in the future — a future that resembles a mirage: beautiful and promising, yet the closer you approach, the further it recedes. “When we return, the first thing I’ll do is go to my grandfather’s grave,” says one. “When we return, I’ll plant a new pomegranate tree in my garden,” dreams another. They use when, not if — and that is how they survive.

The other part does not believe. The pain of betrayal is so deeply rooted in their souls that there is no room left for hope. “Return where?” they ask bitterly. “To the place where they turn our churches into barns, where they trample our graves? Haven’t you seen the satellite images?” They speak of bitter realities, of painful facts others try to ignore. For them, talking about return is like tearing open their wounds again and again. Their souls have hardened into a protective shell to avoid the pain of yet another disappointment.

And I… I stand in the middle. My heart desperately wants to believe the former, but my reason listens to the sober voice of the latter.

Every night, I fall asleep with the dream of return, and every morning, I awake to the reality of loss.

This duality is driving us mad. Our lives have turned into waiting — but not the waiting for a loved one’s call or the coming of spring. This is the waiting of uncertainty, a waiting that does not give life but kills, drop by drop. We have become stone statues, our gazes fixed on the horizon, toward the place where our lives remain.

The betrayed struggle

The home that breathes memories

Parallel to the question of return arises another — more personal, more piercing — question that gnaws at our hearts: Are our homes still there? Still standing?

This is not a question of stone and concrete. It is a question about the sanctuary of memory. Home is not merely a structure to us; it is a living organism, a member of the family. Its walls have absorbed the sound of our laughter, the salt of our tears, the whispers of our dreams. I remember how the first ray of sunlight slipped through my bedroom window each morning and painted my desk. I remember the unique groan of our gate — so familiar, one could always tell who was arriving. I remember the smell of my mother’s books in the library, the irreplaceable taste of fruit from the trees my father planted.

Is all of this still there?

This fear is stronger than the fear of physical annihilation. We can come to terms with the idea that a bomb may have destroyed our house — that would be the logic of war. But the thought that our sanctuary might be desecrated, that a stranger might sleep in our bed, leaf through our photo albums…that is unbearable.

Many of us never fully unpacked our suitcases. Our belongings remain half-hidden in boxes, silent testimony that we do not consider this place our home. How can we buy new dishes when we remember the cups our grandmother left behind in the kitchen cupboard? Every new item, every attempt to settle into this life, feels like a betrayal of our past, of our home.

A whole life placed in a suitcase

Are our homes waiting for us?

Or have they, too, surrendered their souls, unable to endure our absence? Perhaps their walls have already cooled, their windows blinded by grief. Perhaps they, too, dream every night of our return, only to wake each morning to the sound of foreign footsteps.

These questions have no answers. And that unanswerability is the most terrifying thing of all. It suspends us between past and future, in a place with no present. We live not here and now, but there and then. Until our foot touches that soil again, until our hand once more brushes the wall of our beloved house, we remain bodies without souls.

Ո՞րն է բաբո՛, մեր հայրենիք
Do I have a Homeland, or…

Many ask, “But aren’t you in the homeland? Isn’t Armenia your homeland?” This is not a question that can be asked lightly. It is a thorn lodged deep in my heart, one I wake with and fall asleep beside every day.

Yes, my homeland is here, under the gaze of Ararat, but it is an incomplete homeland. My soul knows the truth: my Armenia is dismembered. It is a body from which the heart has been torn out, yet it continues to breathe through pain and memory alone. Armenia without Artsakh is a temple without sanctity, a tree without the roots that remain in enemy-held soil.

Sometimes, I open a map and stare at those meaningless lines that pretend to define where “ours” ends and “the foreign” begins. But no line, no border, can measure the boundless pain of a person who has lost their land.

The soul’s map recognizes no borders. On the map of my soul, Artsakh was never merely a territory; it was our nation’s collective prayer, the breath of our millennia-old history. Its voice echoed in the silence of Dadivank’s stones, flowed with the waters of the Tartar River and lingered like incense in the twilight at Gandzasar. It was the voice of our people: solidified in khachkars, dissolved in the fragrance of candle smoke.

The road of exile։ Artsakh’s night sky for the last time

Conclusion: An unfinished story

I write this story not to finish it, but to begin a conversation we are all afraid to have. This is my story, but it is not mine alone. It is the silent scream of hundreds of thousands who walk beside you, yet live in another reality.

Will we return? I do not know. Perhaps the believers are right, and one day the wheel of history will turn in our favor. Perhaps the skeptics are right, and our homes are condemned to the same slow death we endure here.

But I know one thing: as long as at least one Armenian lives in this world, in whose heart the mountains of Artsakh are more real than the city they inhabit, Artsakh is alive.

It lives in our longing, in our songs, in the eyes of our children. It lives in the vow of return that we make to our heroes every time we visit Yerablur.

Our journey is not yet finished. The struggle continues. And we walk on, carrying in our hearts the light of our lost homeland — the light we extinguished at the Hakari Bridge, yet which continues to burn within us.

I may never know the answer to my question, but I will continue to live as a reminder that the homeland is more than just soil. It is love, it is faith, it is duty. And until my last breath, when my lips whisper “homeland,”  my heart will answer: “Artsakh.”

All photos are courtesy of Vahagn Khachatrian unless otherwise noted.

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