Listen to Sheila’s personal reading of “Searching for Garegin”.
Hi. My name is Sheila, and I have trust issues.
I suppose it would be weird to have lived as long as I have without developing at least some trust issues along the way. Mine, however, can verge on the neurotic and date back to as far as I can remember. As a kid, when my mother said she would pick me up from school at 4 p.m., but arrived at, say, 4:30, all I could think the whole way home was, but you said FOUR.
Even now, as a grown-up, when I call one of my friends and they say, “I’ll call you right back,” but then they don’t call me right back, I may quickly spiral into obsession over why they hate me so much and whether we were ever really friends in the first place. That is, of course, only until they eventually do call me back. Which they almost always do.
I know I’m not alone in attaching enormous importance to whether people keep their word, or in reading that as a reflection of their integrity. But I can also recognize that it’s not entirely fair to hold them to such exacting standards. People forget, circumstances change, and as a double divorcée who has broken her own “till death do us part” promise twice, I know I should probably be a little more chill about things like this. I’m working on it. And a man I met in Artsakh a little over four years ago has, without knowing it, helped me see that sometimes breaking a promise can even be the right thing to do.
In July 2022, I went to Artsakh to conduct field research. Nearly two years had passed since the ceasefire that ended the 44-Day War, but tensions remained high. Azerbaijan had been applying increasing pressure on the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had weakened the capacity of the peacekeepers meant to be guaranteeing security there. By then, Armenians around the world had started sounding the alarm, warning the international community that Nagorno-Karabakh was on the brink of ethnic cleansing.
At the same time, though, the message coming out of Artsakh was unwavering. We will never leave. Whatever happens, we will stay. We will never accept to live under Azerbaijani rule, but neither will we ever abandon our lands or our homes.
I understood the conviction behind it, but I was having trouble reconciling the two propositions. If a population is genuinely on the brink of ethnic cleansing, there must already be a level of fear or coercion so high that displacement is becoming inevitable. Ethnic cleansing doesn’t necessarily require people to be physically dragged from their homes; it can also be accomplished by making life so dangerous or intolerable that leaving becomes the only option.
So how close were people in Artsakh to that point? How afraid were they? And what would happen if that danger became acute? Surely nobody expected an entire population to voluntarily surrender to death, imprisonment, persecution or life under a government that openly despised them. So how literally was I supposed to understand all this talk about never leaving if things really took a turn for the worse? And if staying eventually became impossible, was there an evacuation plan in place?
This was part of what I had gone to Artsakh to try to figure out. I travelled around, met with state officials, community leaders and ordinary people, asked questions and listened. The answers were remarkably consistent. People were afraid, even terrified, but they were also adamant that they were not going anywhere. Much of that, I think, came from an inability to imagine an existence outside the place they loved and knew as home.
But beneath many of those conversations was also an assumption that, somehow, if things became truly dire, someone would step in. Russia was there. So was Armenia. The international community was engaged. There were negotiations and diplomats and courts and peacekeepers and all sorts of very important people saying very important things. Surely somebody would stop the worst from happening.
I was less convinced. Being on the outside gave me no special clairvoyance, but it did give me enough distance to see a possibility that was much harder to contemplate from within Artsakh: that maybe nobody was coming to save them. I certainly didn’t go around telling people that. What would be the point of crushing their hope, especially when you don’t even live there and would soon return to Yerevan. So, I just kept asking what they themselves would do if the protections failed, the diplomacy faltered, and the danger they feared arrived. Almost everyone told me the same thing: they would never leave.
I didn’t believe them. It went against everything I understood about human nature and the instinct to survive.
Then, I met Garegin.
One of the stops on that trip was Amaras Monastery, one of the oldest and most iconic Armenian Christian sites in Artsakh. It has stood in the Martuni region for nearly seventeen centuries. It’s where St. Grigoris, grandson of St. Gregory the Illuminator, is buried, and where Mesrop Mashtots is said to have established one of the first schools to teach the Armenian alphabet.
I was travelling with a young priest who was helping interpret between English and Armenian for me when we met Garegin, a 62-year-old man from the area, who happened to be there. What I remember most clearly was the visible depth of his sadness. Before he even started telling me his story, I could tell just by looking at him how worn down he was.
Garegin had fought in both Artsakh wars. He showed me scars across his body, including from bullet wounds, and told me he had lost many members of his family, including a son, who had fought alongside him in the second war defending Amaras. When I asked what he would do if Artsakh fell under Azerbaijani rule, he looked down in despair and vowed: “These are our lands. I will stay with my mother’s bones and let them kill me.”
I hugged him and we cried together. His declaration was as bleak as the many others I had heard, but his, in particular, frightened me because for the first time, I believed it.
He seemed so stripped and drained of everything that mattered most to him that death might actually seem preferable to another war or dispossession.
We exchanged a little more, and then, when it was time for me to go, Garegin did something incredibly sweet. He gifted me an ornament he had woven from wheat stalks. It was intricate and beautiful and so delicate that I was afraid it would break before I got home. He told me his father had taught him how to make them. The image that detail conjured was so idyllic it was almost surreal: this tall, rugged, battle-scarred man who had spent part of his life fighting wars to defend this land also sat in those same fields, in times of relative peace, weaving intergenerational wreaths of wheat.
The drive back to Yerevan was rough and long, taking several hours, and I carried the wreath in my lap the entire way so it would not break. When I got home, I hung it on the wall beside my bed, and prayed that God would protect the people of Artsakh.
Shortly after that trip, I had to leave for a few months’ work in Cambodia, and I remember deciding that when I returned to Armenia, I would move to Artsakh for a while, maybe six months, and actually live among the people whose future everyone else was discussing from outside. But in December 2022, the blockade of the Lachin Corridor, Artsakh’s only lifeline to the rest of the world, began, triggering a humanitarian crisis for nearly ten months. Then came September 2023, when Azerbaijan launched a full scale military assault on the tiny enclave, forcing more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee Nagorno-Karabakh for Armenia. Within the space of roughly a week, nearly the entire Armenian population was gone.
I thought about Garegin when the exodus began. I wondered whether he had left with everyone else, but mostly I doubted it. Of all the people who had insisted they would stay, he was the only one who’d convinced me. In the years that followed, he would surface in my mind every so often, usually when my eyes landed on the wheat wreath that by then had blended into the background of my home. Each time, I found myself returning to the same grim assumption: that Garegin had stayed behind and died next to his mother’s bones.
Then, a few weeks ago, I woke up to Garegin’s wreath on the floor.
It had been hanging on my wall for years. There was no obvious reason for it to have fallen. I picked it up and saw that a small section near where it hung had come loose, so I carefully tried to push it back together and rehung it. It seemed secure. About five minutes later, it fell again.
The wreath was damaged now, not destroyed, but for someone who can barely cook an egg, it wasn’t a problem I had any apparent solution for. And because I hate clutter, my predisposition is usually to get rid of things I no longer know what to do with. So, for a split second, the practical part of my brain wondered whether the wreath had simply reached the end of its life and I should throw it away.
That thought was immediately followed by another, much stronger, resounding, ABSOLUTELY NOT. Whatever happened to this thing, I was keeping it. The instinct to preserve this priceless little piece of Artsakh kicked in with such force that it almost knocked me over.
And at that very same moment, the memory of Garegin came back, but this time, I had a bit of revelation. If I could have such a strong instinct to preserve an inanimate object, why did I think he wouldn’t have the same to preserve his own life? Why had I assumed that believing him meant imagining him dead? If Garegin truly meant it that day at Amaras when he said he would never leave—and I still think he did—why did that require him to keep that promise?
The question goes beyond Garegin, because I have heard some extraordinarily cruel things said about the people who fled Artsakh. That they ran away. That they abandoned it. That they were cowards. That if they had really loved their homeland, they would never have deserted it. The implication is grotesque: prove your devotion to your country by dying in it.
Hell no.
People do not cease to love a place because they flee from danger. A decision made after months of isolation, deprivation and fear, followed by bombs falling from the sky, does not become carefree or voluntary simply because a person ultimately leaves. More than 100,000 people arrived in Armenia in that final week of September 2023, exhausted and distressed, carrying whatever they could manage to take with them.
They did what anyone else would have done: they chose to survive. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why anyone would demand that they apologize for that.
If anything, survival may be one of the most Armenian things about the whole story. We can be insufferably romantic about martyrdom, but our continued existence as a people is not the product of everyone heroically staying put. To the contrary, Armenians are still here because countless of our ancestors, at countless moments in history, ran when they had to. They crossed mountains and deserts and seas. They rebuilt in Beirut and Aleppo, Los Angeles and Paris, Montreal and Buenos Aires. They carried recipes and prayers and photographs and language and trauma and family stories into places their grandparents had never even heard of. Our history is not one of refusing to leave, but of refusing to disappear.
Last week marked six years since the start of the 44-Day War, and three years since the mass exodus that emptied Nagorno-Karabakh of its entire indigenous Armenian population. I have been thinking about that timing since the wreath fell, and about how differently I now understand the question I was asking on that research trip in 2022. There was never actually a contradiction. They meant it when they said that they wanted to stay. And when it became impossible to stay, they chose to live, which meant that they had to leave.
Maybe Garegin did too.
When I look at his wreath, I now try to imagine him somewhere in Armenia. Maybe he got into a car after all. Maybe somebody—a daughter, a neighbor, a grandchild, a friend—refused to let the stubborn old man stay behind. Maybe he crossed the border with everyone else, furious and heartbroken, and has spent the last three years trying to make sense of a life he never intended to have. Maybe he still weaves wheat the way his father taught him. Maybe, if I put this broken thing in his hands, he’ll know how to fix it.
Whatever happened, I find myself thinking about Garegin, and promises, differently now. I hope with all my heart that he broke his word. I hope that when the choice finally came between the land he loved and the life he still had, he chose life. And so now, when he comes back to mind, I wonder where he is, I pray that he’s okay, and I hope that maybe someday we might meet again.
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Sheila Paylan is an international human rights lawyer and former legal advisor to the United Nations. Now based in Yerevan, she regularly consults for a variety of international organizations, NGOs, think tanks, and governments.
