“He fought, he strived, he died, but the Turk is now in his home. He probably doesn’t know that the Turk is in his home,” Marine Petrosyan says about her son. The mother’s pain is inexplicable. She is a doctor: it is incalculable how many women she has helped to give life to their children, but in a difficult moment, on the battlefield, she was powerless to be with her son.
Marine Petrosyan’s son is Sergey Atayan. He last went up to the positions on September 8. “One day when I said, ‘You’re going to the posts too soon,’ he replied, ‘Do you want us to get up one day and see the enemy standing at our gate?’” the mother tells Forrights.am in an interview.
The parents say Sergey felt that he was going to the positions for a hard battle. “When he left on September 8, he knew that the situation was bad. Before leaving, he gave me a folder with his diplomas and documents. He said, ‘Dad, take it, I’m leaving.’ He knew that the situation was very serious…”, says the father.
“He loved his homeland like crazy, he was the first to go to protect the border. He was fearless, friendly,” says the mother, standing behind a picture of his son.
Sergey Atayan, a native of Martakert, NK has been volunteering to defend Artsakh since 2022. He has been deployed to positions in shifts every month, as there has been a shortage of personnel. On September 8, 2023, he was deployed for two weeks. He worked in an engineering company.
“On September 19, when the war began, there was an intense shelling of their position for a little over half an hour. During that shelling, two boys from the observation post were wounded. As the senior of the position, he went to help one of the wounded. He worked in an engineering company and volunteered to go to the positions with his colleagues. He told the director that the situation was dire, the enemy’s forces were many times superior to theirs,” his father, Nelson Atayan, told Forrights.am. According to him, after the shelling, the enemy’s special forces attacked his son’s position.
“They repelled the first blow; they fought to the end. Seven people remained in the position, all seven died, they rest in Yerablur [military cemetery],” the father says, noting that he had the opportunity to watch the battle, in which his son participated with his friends.
“I saw just a moment of what the camera captured. The enemy detachment of about 60-70 people was coming at them, they were left with four people, but they were fighting, they did not retreat. It was a close call, the most terrible thing. The distance between them and the enemy position was 30-40 meters. My son’s position was in an unfavorable place, they could not see far. One of the enemy’s positions was on a hill behind them. The boys fought in a circular battle. My son fought until the last bullet. We know that after their battle the enemy took out a big number of corpses,” says Nelson Atayan and notes that his son and his comrades fought with such courage that it drove the enemy crazy.
“The enemy was so furious that they damaged the corpses, we could hardly recognize them. They tortured them. We recognized one by his clothes, one by his mustache, and my son — by his DNA. My son was not killed by a shell explosion, but there were bullet holes all over him. They did not die from shrapnels, but from a Turkish bullet: they fought. They mutilated and tortured the bodies… I cannot go into details.”
Nelson Atayan was saddened by the attitude of the military after his son decided to fight to the end and not spare his life for the homeland. “You know what insults me? After the enemy captured the positions, when there was a ceasefire, after the enemy raised a white flag, collected its victims, my son’s battalion command did not do the same. On the 23rd of the month, the enemy collected the bodies of our boys, gave them to the Russians, and they took them to Stepanakert. I talked to the brigade commander, I said, do you know how many boys you have left in the positions? He replied, ‘My head is not working, don’t say such things’. That man is being praised today. Kyokh was the brigade commander.”
Sergey Atayan participated in the Four-Day War in 2016, his father says that he participated in the battles a few positions beyond Robert Abajyan’s position. “It was a very dangerous position. Until the end of June, he was in Talish, Mataghis. At that time, he was not in military.”
He volunteered to serve in the 44-Day War, but since he worked in an engineering company, he had to carry out technical work. “They were building roads through the forest, they built shelters in Alashan for the soldiers evacuated from Mataghis, and at night they were building a defensive line. He escaped from drone strikes several times, because the equipment had noticed it.”
Sergey Atayan is buried in the Yerablur military pantheon [in Armenia].
Narek Kirakosyan
