Raw & Unfiltered

In this deeply personal reflection on the third anniversary of the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh, Yana Lalaian returns to the landscapes of Artsakh through memories of family, food, rivers and village life. As the possibility of losing that landscape becomes real, memory itself becomes a way of holding on to home.

Three years after the displacement of Artsakh’s Armenians, the routines of exile have become ordinary. Siranush Sargsyan explores how a displaced community navigates grief, memory, identity and belonging while rebuilding lives in Armenia and abroad, and struggling to imagine a future beyond loss.

What does travel mean when you can’t return to the one place you most long for? Journeying through Morocco, Siranush Sargsyan finds traces of her lost homeland, Artsakh, in unfamiliar landscapes, traditions and people, revealing how displacement transforms the experience of elsewhere.

Women are increasingly visible in Armenia’s mining industry, but employment does not necessarily mean equality. In Kajaran, Gayane Ghazaryan explores how women navigate hazardous work, limited economic alternatives and the unpaid domestic labor that begins when their shifts end.

For generations, Armenians in the diaspora have been told that returning to the homeland is a duty. But what if the stronger case for Armenia is not sacrifice, obligation or identity alone, but the possibility of building a meaningful life in a place that offers connection, opportunity and belonging?

Through a series of unfinished questions, photographer Vaghinak Ghazaryan’s photo essay explores the lasting emotional imprint of the 44-day war on the soldiers who lived through it, tracing memory, loss and the difficult process of carrying war into everyday life.

Yerevan’s Hrazdan River embodies the city’s contradictions: beauty and neglect, belonging and exclusion, ecological loss and fragile possibilities for coexistence, public life and environmental consciousness. In this personal observation, Taline Oundjian looks at what the river reveals about the city itself.

A soulful and moving essay on inheritance, memory and survival, Ani Poghosyan traces her family’s story from the Armenian Genocide to the present, exploring how trauma endures across generations, not as memory alone, but as ritual, silence, and the quiet work of tending what remains.

Marking April 24, Narine Vlasyan speaks with Michele Wegner, son of Armin Wegner, one of the key eyewitnesses of the Armenian Genocide, about memory, moral courage, and the burden of bearing witness, then and now, and the haunting question of why so few chose to truly see.

From refuge to power, and now to uncertainty, Lebanon’s Armenians built a remarkable “state within a state.” Arno Khlgatian explores how it emerged, endured war and upheaval, and what its gradual decline reveals about the future of diaspora identity and influence.