Mataghis is a village located near the northeast border of Nagorno Karabakh. It was occupied during the war by the Azerbaijanis, who emptied the village of Armenians and leveled it. Arthur Mejlumyan, the head of the village administration in Mataghis, said that the population after independence was three times smaller than before, although the village was of great importance to Karabakh.
The 2005 Hayastan All-Armenian Armenia Fund telethon was dedicated in its entirety to the region of Martakert.
Larisa Sargsyan lives in Hadrut. She is a solo singer and one of the founding members of the Karabakh Song and Dance Ensemble; she has been with the ensemble for more than four decades.
I wanted to write “A School That Resembles A Ruin” but I think this is a more befitting title, because a school can end up looking like a ruin for a number of reasons – say, an earthquake, fire or flood – but I had never before seen a ruin that resembles a school.
Arakyul is one of the ancient villages of Karabagh. After the liberation movement, in the result of joint efforts of soviet soldiers and Azerbaijani all the Armenians living in the village were deported. Nothing has been left from the village. The only memory is the church built in the early 20 th century which Azerbaijani couldn't manage to destroy.
In Hadrut I was looking for people with interesting background. I learned about the one growing fir-trees of whom the people of Hadrut used to tell smilingly – “Yes, he is our occupant”. The word “occupant” sounds unpleasant and I could not imagine whom I was going to meet there.
There are immigrants from Armenia in Arakyul village of Hadrut region. One of them is Vachagan Mkrtchian. During the war Vachagan has participated in the liberation of Hadrut and Martakert.
Our interview interrupted Tamar Galstyan's chemistry class at the Aygepar Secondary School. The schoolchildren quietly listened to their teacher's narrative, an account of war in every sense of the word.
Elya Hovhanissyan lives very close to the border. The border separates Armenia and Azerbaijan or Tavush and Tovuz, or simply, Aygepar and Alibeyli.
The village of Aygepar in the Tavush Marz, some 200 kilometers from Yerevan, was founded in 1949 when a tobacco curing plant was established there.
About a month ago I got a copy of the book by British reporter Thomas de Waal - Black Garden: Azerbaijan and Armenia between Peace and War - that I had been interested in reading for some time.
People call the craftsmen who make copper pots and pans Klekchis. Yervand Asryan is known in Karabakh as the Klekchi Yervand Dayi. He lives in the village of Vank in the Martakert region. His house is situated on a hill near the Gandzasar monastery.
"If you grew up in the shade of the mulberry-tree, you are a citizen of that country," said 73-year-old Slava Mosunts, who after long years of research has created a genealogical tree of Martakert.
The village of Garnakar is located in Nagorno Karabakh's Martakert region, near the road to Gantzasar. It is a small village. Only 80 people live here, although the village mayor, Gagik Zakharyan, says there are nearly 160 registered residents.
With financial support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and in cooperation with the International Organization for Migration (IOM Armenia) the NGO Meghri-1 is implementing a pilot project aimed at revitalizing the village of Shvanidzor and restoring its potable and irrigation water systems.
Meghri is the southernmost region of Armenia. It borders Zangelan on the east and Nakhichevan on the west. Its neighbor to the south is Iran; the border passes along the length of the Arax River.
In the end, it has turned out that the Kapan-Meghri strategic highway is going to bypass the Shikahogh State Preserve, or Mtnadzor, the only virgin forest left in Armenia . Although government officials did everything they could to diminish the role of society, non-governmental organizations, in particular those that deal with nature protection, waged a persistent, unyielding battle to protect the forest, and this time they won.
Mr. Hakob, a Jerusalem Armenian shopkeeper, is talking to a Russian-Armenian family in front of his kiosk. At first, he didn’t realize they were Armenian, because he heard them speaking Russian, a language as widely used in Jerusalem as in any post-Soviet city.
Who's that?' I asked from behind the door. 'The wolf' - was the answer.
"The state of a country can and must be judged by the conditions of its detention facilities," says Mikayel Danielyan, the chairman of the Helsinki Association of Armenia.
There is no law in Armenia providing for criminal liability for domestic violence. The lack of such a law creates an atmosphere of impunity and is conducive to domestic violence.
Sitting in twilight, almost invisible through the camera lens, a woman tells of her personal tragedy. Studies show that stories like hers are all too common.
Wars have been waged for millennia; they are being waged today and will be waged tomorrow. Neither the causes nor the goals have changed. But the means have changed, and the weapons have been perfected. And as they have been perfected, peaceful populations have increasingly become targets, and wars have moved beyond conventional limits.