“In peacetime, I was a craftsman; when there was a war, I was an artilleryman,” 45-year-old Artsakh resident Hakob Grigoryan briefly tells about his life.
Grigoryan, a father of three, was wounded in the legs during the 2020 war, but returned to the front line shortly after. And in September 2023, he went to be with his newly recruited son, and delivered bread to the serving men.
“During the blockade, my son was drafted, we went on foot twice to see him. There was no other way to go. We thought, he’s a boy, let him go serve. When the war started, the girls were at school, I went and brought him under the shelling. There was nothing to think about: I got in the car to go find my son,” Grigoryan says.
Recalling what he saw on the way, he says that there was shelling, with all its consequences. “They had fired rockets on the road to Gandzasar. The dust was still rising. There were both corpses and wounded on the road, a lot of them… We realized that it was dangerous to continue, we took the wounded to the village medical center… I asked God to let us reach the place, the wounded to survive… I am extremely pleased with them commanders, because they had the right and competent approach: they separated the new recruits and kept them for the last reserve, because they were not yet well trained in their work.”
Hakob remembers that at that moment he felt torn between two stones, because on the one hand he wanted to be with his son, but on the other hand his family was in Stepanakert, which was being bombed. “In the end, I decided to return to Stepanakert. I didn’t want to take my son with me, to take him out of service. What if he could stay and save someone’s life? If I had taken my son, brought him to Stepanakert, nobody would have said anything to me, but I decided that he should stay in service… Two days later, news spread that the area where my son was had been taken by the Turks. How did they take it? I was there last night. I started to think about what had happened to the boys, to my son. It was impossible to find any information. I met a soldier’s father by chance, he said that his son had managed to call, that the boys had retreated, that they were in the village of Seyrishen.”
I gathered as much food as I could from our and my neighbors’ houses and went to the boys. I arrived, the cars were parked under the trees, the boys were completely covered in mud… When I saw my son, I was very moved.”
Making sure that his son was okay, Grigoryan returned to Stepanakert again. Two days later the soldiers were discharged and his son returned to his family.
When leaving Stepanakert, Hakob decided to take his medals and identity documents with him. He kept them in a car that he drove, and he accompanied his wife and children in another car. “I thought that if they find the medals and my things and catch me, our falks wouldn’t be in that car.”
Fortunately, Hakob’s car crossed the Hakar Bridge without any obstacles, and the family was reunited in Goris.
The family now lives in the Aramus community of Kotayk region of Armenia. Hakob is busy with his work as a craftsman, saying he doesn’t know what awaits them, but at the moment the most important thing is that the family is safe, and his son is slowly overcoming the heavy, tragic consequences of what he experienced and went through in the war.
Ani Gevorgyan