56-year-old Gayane Aghayan does not want to talk about about her warm and close family members in the past tense. As a result of the gas station explosion in Stepanakert, her daughter’s husband, Sergey Hovhannisyan, was killed, and her son, Robert Aghayan, is still considered missing. The forcibly displaced family from Artsakh assumes that Robert’s remains are under the collapsed roof of the gas station.
“I have never made a difference between my son and my son-in-law, we have always been a warm family… and still are. Robert was 32 years old. He was not married. He was an army officer, went through three wars in 2016, 2020 and 2023. From all three of them he returned safely, and only three days later the tragedy happened. Same with my son-in-law. He was 34 years old, he has three children, he went through three wars, he was also an army officer. During the last war, when the enemy bombarded the command post, most of the people there were killed, Sergey miraculously survived. He received a contusion and was taken to the hospital. The next day, Robert went to the hospital, found Sergey, and both of them returned home. When the war was over, we started gathering, the boys started looking for fuel for our three cars so that they could take all the family members out of Artsakh safely,” says Gayane Aghayan.
She remembers that on the morning of the incident, her husband son and son-in-law were going from gas station to gas station, but they could not find any gas. “I called and said, come and eat something and then go again. There was nothing normal to eat either, the day before yesterday my son had managed to find a few kilograms of flour so that I could at least bake bread for the journey. They came, ate. I was tired; I went to bed. My daughter put her younger son to sleep. Suddenly, I heard someone calling from behind the door that they brought gasoline. The boys just jumped out. My husband also wanted to go, but at the last moment my son told him: ‘You stay, relax, we will go and get it.’ I still curse myself for not stopping them. I couldn’t know what was going to happen, and I didn’t even go out to say goodbye…”
After some time, Gayane heard a noise. She thought it was thunder, then the phone rang and they learned that there was a big explosion at the gas station.
“I started calling the boys; both of them were unreachable. When we didn’t get a call from them for a while, I realized that my boys are gone… We jumped out of the house, ran five kilometers to the hospital on foot. And what we saw there was simply hellish. Most of the people had already left, and so had the doctors. Ambulances were coming, the gathered people surrounded them in the dark so that they could find their relatives among those brought in. Everyone was shouting, screaming: it was like the end of the world. If someone were to describe the end of the world, it would be like this,” says the woman.
Ms. Gayane bypassed everyone and went up to the hospital rooms and started opening the doors one by one and shouting the names of her son and son-in-law. “What I saw there at that time is indescribable. Ashy faces, blackened, swollen, burnt people… I started shouting the names. I passed two floors, but couldn’t find them. People were already lying on the ground in the corridors. Shouts, screams…it was terrible. I ran home so that we could go to the peacekeepers from there because someone said that some wounded people were taken there… It was the most terrible night of my life. There was no connection, it was not possible to connect anywhere by phone. It was impossible to learn anything from anyone. The whole night I was sitting on my bed rocking from side to side and saying, ‘Am I a mother? My child is gone, my children are gone and I am sitting… what should I do?… My daughter was putting her three children to sleep in the next room… In the morning she came and said, “Mom, we must be ready for everything…”
The day after the incident, in the evening, due to the large tattoo on his arm, Sergey was found in a Yerevan hospital in a seriously injured condition. A few hours later, however, his relatives received the news of his death.
The family was never able to find the keys to the two cars that Robert and Sergey had with them. They had to load their essentials on the oldest car and set off for Armenia.
“The car had neither headlights nor brakes. We spent a terrible fifty hours on the road. It was a hellish road. The bread had run out, there was no water, the three small children were restless, the youngest was crying all the time… I already thought that we would not get there… When we crossed the Hakari bridge, I already had a nervous shecks. I thanked God that at least we were able to remove the children from there…” says Mrs. Gayane.
A few days later, Sergey was buried in Yerablur, but there is still no news from Robert. His DNA was not found in the remains collected from the scene. “It got to the point when I was praying that at least some part of his body would be found and given to me, but no… To this day, there is no news about twenty people. I go to my son-in-law’s grave and beg him at least to tell me how to find my son…”
Gayane Aghayan with his family now lives on rent in Yerevan. As in Stepanakert, here too she works at school. She cannot talk about the future; she says that they all live here in the present day.
Ani Gevorgyan