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Armenian Cultural Renaissance In the Ottoman Empire
CC: Pasadena mechanic turns scrap metal into art
Armenian Heritage Month: Family auto shop becomes art studio
FOX 11’s Araksya Karapetyan introduces you to a local artist who is turning metal into sculptures, many of which are inspired by his Armenian roots.
The Brief
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- Pasadena mechanic Tro Khayalian is transforming discarded auto parts and scrap metal into intricate sculptures, blending decades of family labor with artistic _expression_.
- His work explores themes of Armenian identity, history, and survival, including pieces that memorialize the Armenian Genocide and the 2020 war.
- Khayalian’s latest collection, “Mind in Flight,” debuts April 9 at the Glenmark Hotel, featuring bird-inspired works symbolizing freedom and the human life cycle.
PASADENA, Calif. – Inside a family mechanic shop that has served the community for nearly 50 years, Tro Khayalian works with steel, heat, noise and muscle.
He bends pipe. He fixes exhaust systems. He stands among old bolts, worn parts, scraps of metal and tools marked by grease and repetition.
Then he transforms those same materials into something else. He makes sculpture out of what other people leave behind.
The shop sits at the center of his life. His father and uncle built the business after immigrating from Syria.
Khayalian grew up there, surrounded by repair work, family rhythm and the rough poetry of a place where damaged things come in and leave whole again.
That history matters because his art rises from the same instinct.
RELATED COVERAGE: FOX 11 celebrates Armenian Heritage Month with a special on culture, travel, and inspiring stories
He does not separate labor from imagination. He does not treat the shop as one life and sculpture as another. The metal, the memory and the family story all travel together.
He says the shop shaped him early, not only as a worker but as someone who learned to see discarded things differently. A car part did not have to remain a car part. A broken object could hold another shape inside it. That way of seeing now drives a body of work that transforms scrap metal, hardware and even kitchen utensils into art that feels both personal and hard-won.
“I’ve grown up here in the shop,” Khayalian said. “I also love doing art.”
That instinct never really left him. It deepened with time. What others might pass over as useless, he studies for line, weight, tension and possibility.
The castoff object becomes raw material for memory and invention.
“I used to see car parts differently when I was younger,” he said. “I get more satisfaction out of scrap metal car parts in my sculptures when I create them. Nothing is junk to me.”
Friends and relatives now save pieces for him, handing him spoons, screws, nails and scraps because they know he may find life in them again.
“All of a sudden you see friends and family with a bucket with their old spoons,” he said. “‘Hey, make something out of this.’ I use nails, screws, bolts, nuts, anything that I could get my hands on.”
By day, Khayalian handles exhaust systems, a trade that calls for control, force and an intimate feel for metal.
He bends tubing and piping with the practiced precision of someone who knows where a stubborn material will resist and where it will give. That work demands patience and touch.
It also helps explain why his sculptures carry such a strong physical presence. They do not feel imagined from a distance. They feel handled, wrestled with and coaxed into form. In his world, the mechanic’s workbench and the artist’s table sit close together.
The same eye that studies line and curve in metal for function studies it again for meaning.
“My specific job here is I do exhaust systems,” he said. “So, I bend tubings and pipings. That’s more like an art form for me.”
He does not romanticize the labor. Working with metal leaves a mark. The heat, the grinding, the repetition and the force all register in the body.
His art may carry grace and symbolism, but it begins in strain. It begins in hands that absorb impact and in a body that must stay with the work long enough to make hard material yield.
“It takes a lot of toll on your hands and your body for sure,” he said. “A lot of heat comes out to it. A lot of grinding.”
Still, he returns to sculpture for reasons that reach beyond craft. He describes the process as challenge, but also as release.
The same shop that demands physical effort also offers him a kind of stillness. In that sense, the work becomes more than design or assembly. It becomes a way to empty out what he carries inside.
“It’s a different approach that I take to it,” he said. “The meditation through my sculptures. It satisfies me a lot more.”
Much of that inner life flows toward Armenian identity and memory.
One sculpture honors the Armenian Genocide. It does not treat history as something distant or sealed away. It pulls grief and survival into the present through symbols that speak directly to heritage, language and endurance.
The Armenian alphabet appears in the work. So do forget-me-not flowers. Together they turn sculpture into testimony.
“I want to show people what we have endured with all the pain through one of my sculptures,” Khayalian said. “The base is a tree trunk. We have our Armenian alphabet. Our language. It’s dear to us. We’re eternally grateful for our culture and our Armenian people.”
That sense of inheritance runs through the entire story. The family business traces back to Syria. The art points toward Armenia. The shop stands in Pasadena, where many diasporic lives have taken root while still looking back toward other homes, other ruptures and other beginnings.
Khayalian’s work seems to hold those geographies together. It understands that home is not always one place. Sometimes it is a chain of places. Sometimes it is language. Sometimes it is memory.
Sometimes it is the act of making something lasting from fragments that remain.
His wife, Maral, says inspiration also enters through ordinary domestic life, through what the family watches, talks about and absorbs together. Even pop culture can spark a burst of work.
She recalls the household’s fascination with the Johnny Depp trial, which led Khayalian toward a run of pieces that turned obsession into object, including a large metal Black Pearl ship and a sculpture inspired by the Mad Hatter’s hat.
“It started with my obsession with the Johnny Depp trial,” Maral said. “It was 24-7 in our household.”
She said of the pieces, “They were labors of love for him.”
She says life with an artist keeps the house alive with surprise. She also points to more serious events that have pushed him inward and then back toward creation.
The 2020 war in Armenia, she says, stirred something in him and led him to make more work. Even when the pieces carry whimsy or fantasy, they remain tethered to grief, concern and the pressure of history.
“It’s actually quite exciting in our household to have someone as creative as Tro live with us,” Maral said. “Every day is something different.” She added, “Closer to the 2020 war in Armenia it just evoked something inside of him to start creating more.”
Today, a small room inside the shop serves as a kind of private museum.
Customers may arrive expecting a repair estimate and end up in a conversation about sculpture, symbolism and process.
It is a fitting image for the world Khayalian has built. The shop remains a place of labor and livelihood, but it also opens into something more intimate.
“It’s like my little museum,” Khayalian said. “Whoever comes and once their car is done, we totally forget about the payments and then we’re talking about my art.”
His newest exhibit, “Mind in Flight,” opens April 9 at the Glenmark Hotel in Glendale.
The collection centers on bird-inspired sculptures and reaches toward freedom, love and the stages of human connection.
Birds make an apt subject here. They suggest motion, release, migration and return.
For Khayalian, the series traces a human arc, from solitude to partnership to home and family.
“It’s going to be called ‘Mind in Flight,’ where trying to elevate your thoughts and your mind to be free,” he said. “It’s like a life story. We all start off alone, then we find our significant other, and then we build a home. Finally, you fall in love. You become a parent.”
In the end, Khayalian describes the impulse behind all of it in plain words. He has something inside that needs release, and sculpture gives it form.
In this Pasadena shop, that _expression_ arrives in steel and fire, in fragments joined together, in symbols of heritage and echoes of displacement.
“Whatever I have inside of me, I have to let it out,” Khayalian said. “The only way I could express is through my art.”
The Source: This report is based on direct interviews with Tro Khayalian and his wife, Maral in Pasadena. The information regarding the “Mind in Flight” exhibit and the artist’s creative process was gathered through first-hand observations of the workshop and the artist’s private collection.
168: Change the default selection rule. time works in favor of power
April 10, 2026
With the hasty amendment made by the National Assembly in the “Electoral Code”, the parties were forbidden to use names and personal names when participating in the elections. It is clear that this was done to prevent the registration of the electoral bloc named after Samvel Karapetyan. As always, the political field mostly reacted with more sharp humor, sarcasm, imaginings of new bans by Nikol Pashinyan…
But what happened should not be a joke, but a cause for deep concern for most humorists. This legislative change, testifying to the total lack of democracy in Armenia, means that Nikol Pashinyan does not care about any legal, democratic structure and will deal with the results of the elections in the same way as he dealt with the “Electoral Code” two days ago, to suit his political interest. The formation of the next government in Armenia will not be influenced by sociological polls, nor by the activity of people at the polling station, nor by the abundance of votes received by the opposition and by the CP.
The outcome of the elections will be determined by one factor: the degree of manageability of the vertical system of power by Nikol Pashinyan. Even up to today, that indicator is close to one hundred percent.
Moreover, the loyalty of the government and state systems is built on the principle “without Nikol, everyone’s destruction”. The effectiveness of the latter, that is, Pashinyan’s ability to manage the system, increases with the hardening of the opposition’s rhetoric. the more the opposition makes verbal threats, the more the instinct of the state administration system and law enforcement officers to devote themselves more selflessly to the reproduction of the government operating for self-preservation.
Nikol Pashinyan needs the total manageability of the vertical state system not only and perhaps not so much to satisfy his own despotism, but to ensure the reproduction of power. And while the opposition presents the amendment of the “Electoral Code” as a manifestation of Pashinyan’s fears (it’s not that Pashinyan is not afraid), he shows with this next step that he controls the political and state systems, all decision-making institutions to such an extent that after the elections, regardless of the results of the elections, he can even pass a new law through the still functioning National Assembly, by which he will declare himself Armenia forever. manager.
The West, within the framework of the fight against “hybrid war”, will applaud this, declaring that Armenia has turned from a bastion of democracy into a newly discovered continent of democracy. And Russia will “respect the election of the friendly Armenian people” with the calculation of calling the newly elected Pashinyan to Moscow once again at a convenient moment and establishing itself on him.
The opposition has very little time and less opportunity to change this status quo, which is getting stronger every day. It should lead to a change in the atmosphere of conducting the elections according to Pashinyan’s game rules and imposing a new rule. At this point, and with today’s toolkit from the opposition, that seems ridiculously impossible.
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The erasure of historical memory cannot be caused by short-term politics
April 10, 2026
A letter regarding the forced resignation of Gzoyan, director of HCTI
April 9, 2026
Committee on Academic Freedom
Armenia:
N.G. Nikol Pashinyan
Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia
Your Excellency,
We are writing to you on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) to express our concern regarding reports of the forced resignation of Dr. Edita Gzoyan, director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation (AGMIF).
We urge his immediate reinstatement and demand that your office guarantee the academic integrity of the institute.
MESA was founded in 1966 with the goal of promoting scholarly research and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. As a leading organization in the field, MESA publishes the “International Journal of Middle East Studies” and has around 2,800 members worldwide. MESA is committed to promoting academic freedom and freedom of expression both in the region and in the context of research in the region in North America and elsewhere.
Dr. Gzoyan, who was elected to his position in 2024 by the HCTI Board of Trustees, has played a key leadership role in promoting new scholarly work on the Armenian Genocide, modernizing the museum, and integrating young Armenian scholars into the global community of Genocide scholars.
His own scientific works on the transportation of children during the Armenian Genocide were published in leading European and American periodicals. He drew positive international attention to HCTI.
Therefore, we are concerned about press releases and communications with Armenian colleagues, according to which Dr. Gzoyan was forced to resign on February 10, 2026, after the official visit of US Vice President JD Vance to HCTI.
During that visit, he presented several of the Institute’s publications, including a paper on early 20th-century American press coverage of massacres and attacks against Transcaucasian Armenians that mention Nagorno-Karabakh, and accompanied Mr. Vance and his wife, Usha Bala Vance, to the museum and Armenian Genocide Memorial.
During the press conference on March 12, 2026, you mentioned that you demanded his resignation due to the inclusion of the Institute’s books on Nagorno Karabakh, calling those books “provocative” and contrary to Armenia’s foreign policy. Then, you bypassed the established procedure and appointed one of your staff members to the position of director, and replaced the members of the independent board of trustees with political allies.
We understand that Armenia is in a difficult and difficult situation, striving to end the multi-year conflict with Azerbaijan and reach a normalization of relations. However, erasure of historical memory cannot be caused by short-term political needs.
One of the goals of the establishment of HCTI was to confront the denial of the Armenian Genocide.
Protecting the academic freedom of scientists associated with one of the world’s leading research institutions and an important scientific resource dedicated to the study of the history and memory of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, HCTI, is essential.
We ask you to immediately restore Dr. Gzoyan to his position.
We urge the Government of Armenia to act quickly to remedy what appears to be an unjustified interference with scientific independence, and to restore the confidence of the international academic community in the institutional integrity of HCTI and Armenia’s commitment to academic freedom and fundamental human rights.
Հարգանքներով՝
Osama Makdisi
President of MESA
Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Judith E. Tucker
Chairman of the Committee on Academic Freedom
Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University
Պատճենը՝
Zhanna Andreasyan, RA Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sports
Anahit Manasyan, RA Human Rights Defender
Michael O’Flaherty, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights
International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)
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The courts of RA on the working conditions of Romanos Petrosyan, the employees of “HETC”.
April 10, 2026
The courts of RA recognize Romanos Petrosyan’s orders to terminate the employment contracts of the employees of “HETC” PB company as invalid.
As a result of the invalidation of dismissal orders for about three dozen employees, in favor of the employees, the amount subject to confiscation reaches hundreds of millions of drams, which will directly harm the owners of the company.
Let’s also remind that the “Tashir” group of companies financed the excess part of the tariff-compensated salary fund, in the amount of about 12 billion AMD, from its own funds in 2016-2025.
At the moment, the company’s salary fund is also not within the limits of the tariff compensatory amount and is partially financed at the expense of the funds of the “Tashir” group.
It turns out that the member of the KP board is making pre-election bribes of the KP at the expense of the owners of the HEP, without agreeing with them.
It is already clear what purposes the HEC will serve…
HEC-Supervisory Committee
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We are dealing with a big fraud. This is not peace. they won’t buy peace
April 10, 2026
The main issue of the Armenian parliamentary elections is the issue of peace, and Nikol Pashinyan has decided to take the monopoly of peace into his hands, which is another big fraud. ANC Prime Minister candidate Levon Zurabyan announced this at the press conference.
According to him, they are the only political force capable of bringing sovereign peace to Armenia.
“Whoever correctly predicts the main issue of the elections and builds his election campaign correctly has the greatest chances to succeed in the given elections. Nikol Pashinyan knows this very well, that’s why he chose peace as his slogan. Pashinyan shows an empty heart with red hands and seems to understand that his hands are bloody,” said Zurabyan.
According to him, Pashinyan is trying to present the non-shooting for 1.5 years, several wagons of gasoline that came to Armenia through the territory of Azerbaijan as peace, but it is not peace.
“The peace treaty has not been signed because Azerbaijan refuses to do so, our prisoners continue to suffer in Baku prisons, in Azerbaijan they continue to talk about the liberation of the Zangezur Corridor, West Azerbaijan and other territories,” he said.
According to the politician, the “Trump’s Way” project, which is presented as a great breakthrough towards peace, has remained at the level of intentions and is losing its vitality as a result of recent developments.
Zurabyan reminded that Pashinyan was opening an “era of peace” even before the 2021 elections, but as a result Artsakh was destroyed and sovereign territories were seized from Armenia.
He emphasized that they are building peace, not begging for it, and no one has the right to make Armenia choose between sovereignty or peace.
The politician is sure that many problems in the country will be solved if the constitutional reform is carried out and the country returns to the semi-presidential system, which will restrain the authorities. According to Zorharbyan, the judicial system of Armenia should be freed from the control of the executive power, and the authorities should fear that they are under control.
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40 million to the same NGO. The “faithful” partner of the director of KGSMN and Matenadaran
April 10, 2026
The NGO in the National Creative Union will again receive a grant from the Ministry of Education and Culture. This is the fifth in the number of this h/c the grant from the Ministry.
With around 40 million drams (39 million 999,600 drams), the organization will once again hold the international conference titled “Images of memory: the latest technologies for preservation and restoration of handwritten and printed written heritage” in Matenadaran from April 27 to May 2.
Let’s note that the “National Creative Union” JSC, which, according to the data of the register of legal entities, has been in existence since 2006, has only been under the auspices of KGSMN grants since 2022, having already received 4 grants.
By the way, last year the amount of the grant was 40 million drams, in 2024 – 49 million drams. the goal was again the same seminar.
There were publications in the press about the former deputy minister of “National Creator” and KGSMS, then the director of Matenadaran. About the connection with Ara Khzmalyan.
Let’s remind: Khzmalyan was the deputy minister of KGSMS from 2019, and from July 2023 – the director of Matenadaran.
But these are not the only commitments that have been placed on the shoulders of the young and energetic Khzmalyan. in April 2025 became famous about the formation of the new Public Council.
Pashinyan announced that he submitted the candidacy of the president of the Public Council from among the 45 members of the Public Council elected in the prescribed manner to the consideration of the Government of the Republic of Armenia.
“Arayik Khzmalyan was appointed as the chairman of the Public Council by the government’s decision N 389-A of April 9, 2025. As of April 10, 2025, the Public Council is considered constituted,” the statement said.
This is how Khzmalyan’s new mission began, for example, he began to go with Pashinyan and the council created by Pashinyan and record what is not recorded by people who, for example, do not consider the Kirants wall a symbol of peace.
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“The video shows a picture close to reality, but it is Adrbe in Artsakh
April 10, 2026
About a month ago, South Korean travel blogger YangMin Skies, who has been to 129 countries of the world, was also visited by Azerbaijan. occupied Armenian Artsakh. He published a video on his YouTube channel about the visit, Artsakh and the situation there, sharing his personal impressions.
In his video, he talks about how Armenians lived in Artsakh for centuries, and in 2023, all of Artsakh was emptied for one day, Armenians were forced to leave their homes. In the video, he also emphasizes that the Armenian presence in Artsakh is being systematically destroyed, structures are being demolished or rebuilt, place names are being changed, everything that reminds of the former residents is consistently disappearing.
The South Korean blogger’s video shocked many people, many witnessed what Azerbaijan is doing in Artsakh: it destroys and modifies all Armenian monuments, demolishes cemeteries, churches.
Artsakh cultural heritage ombudsman, Caucasus expert Hovik Avanesov positively assesses that a foreigner presents what he saw with his own eyes to the world, but regrets that all this does not receive a proper response from the civilized world.
“No international organization responded to the incidents of vandalism in this video, although we did not expect any response from any international organization. But the positive thing is that that video received a great response on various social platforms.
One thing is clear here, that these videos will be used as needed, they can contribute to raising the level of awareness among the international community. That video shows a picture close to reality, but what we saw in the video is a very small part of the devastation that Azerbaijan has carried out in Artsakh.” of 168.am Hovik Avanesov said in a conversation with
According to our interlocutor, Azerbaijan has caused greater destruction in Shushi, Stepanakert, and it is understandable that bloggers visiting Artsakh and foreigners in general are being watched by representatives of the Azerbaijani power structures, not allowing them to make many video shoots in Artsakh.
“All these are facts and may be useful for us in the future, in case of starting legal proceedings, these and similar videos will be used. First, we record the cases of vandalism with satellite photos, the second is the Azerbaijani media, from which the cases of destroyed monuments in Artsakh are highlighted. There were cases when the Azerbaijani media broadcast live how they destroy the monuments of Artsakh, such as the National Assembly, the Foreign Ministry, the building of the Union of Freedom Fighters, etc., added Hovik Avanesov.
According to his definition, there are two mechanisms to curb the cases of vandalism carried out by Azerbaijan in Artsakh, in one case the effectiveness can be 50-60 percent, and in the other case, it will have more than 100 percent results.
The first mechanism, according to him, is to start a legal process against Azerbaijan with these cases, also against the persons who carry out vandalism, this is possible, because these persons constantly film themselves to show their “heroism”.
“The second restraining factor will be if we return to the status quo of Artsakh, we are talking about the complete de-occupation of Artsakh and any Azerbaijani presence there. In this case, Azerbaijan will stop its vandalism, at this moment, of course, all this is not possible, but the work in this direction should not be stopped,” emphasized Hovik Avanesov.
It should be noted that earlier Hovik Avanesov told us that from September 2020 to September 2025, more than 800 cases of vandalism carried out by Azerbaijan in Artsakh have already been recorded. It is only known that Azerbaijan vandalizes Armenian monuments in villages and regional centers on a large scale, destroys entire villages and churches.
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Well, if you are the honest prime minister of “the people”, you would stand up and say: people, Russia
April 10, 2026
The people of Artsakh will not go after these authorities, they will not vote for the government of Nikol Pashinyan. About this 168 TVof Revue announced on the air of the program Metaxe Hakobyan, deputy of Artsakh National Assemblyspeaking about the participation of Armenians forcibly displaced from Artsakh in the National Assembly elections.
The deputy confirms the information that the current authorities of Armenia actually hinder the participation of Artsakh Armenians in the parliamentary elections scheduled for June 7. According to Hakobyan, in 2020-2023 Of the more than 120,000 Artsakh Armenians subjected to ethnic cleansing and forced deportation by Azerbaijan in the occupied Artsakh Republic as a result of Azerbaijani military aggressions, about 35,000 have received RA citizenship, and 22-23,000 of them are adults.
“Actually, they have the right to vote that much. Yes, they are causing obstacles, because recently they are trying to clarify that, as if they are technical problems, the volume is large. There is no such thing. They are intentional obstacles, because if there was no online registration until January 1, people go, they were waiting in passport departments, there are people who registered in October-November, but until now they have not received an answer from the relevant authorities, even though the procedure should have been accelerated for Artsakh citizens. It became online from January 1, and the chaos began, because some of the people of Artsakh, elderly people living in remote, border villages, are not even able to register at all,” explained Metaxe Hakobyan.
The deputy of the “Justice” faction of the Artsakh National Assembly emphasizes that the obstacles are unequivocal. “No matter how much they try to show that the people of Artsakh are in their ranks, it is not so. The people of Artsakh will not choose them.”
Metakse Hakobyan also expressed his displeasure that recently in the opposition field they started to pay tribute to the saying “former-present” or “old-new”.
“People, is that it? Now I want to ask a question to those expressing such thoughts: am I past or present? I was elected a deputy of the Artsakh National Assembly in 2020, before that I was the deputy director of the Assessment and Testing Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Artsakh and I have never been involved in politics. I started doing politics when I already saw danger. I started to know the “old people” they imagined little by little during the course of the war, I saw many of them alive after the displacement of 2023.
Now the question is: am I ancient or present? How do they imagine all that? It is strange that at least 50-60 year olds say such a thing, because they have always been in the political field. I have been saying since 2018 that these authorities have come to hand over Artsakh, and we must fight against these authorities, and I follow that idea to this day. It is very important for the opposition field to confirm today that the people of Artsakh will not follow these authorities. Let’s put 10-20 people aside. unfortunately, there are such people from Artsakh. But don’t divide the people of Artsakh.”
Speaking in this context, the famous Putin-Pashinyan meeting held last week and the meeting between them in the Kremlin conversation, in particular, about Putin’s mention of the subject of Artsakh, Metakse Hakobyan notes that in 2020 According to the tripartite declaration of November 9, adopted at the end of the forty-four-day war, all three parties had commitments: Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Russian peacekeeping force.
“Let’s leave aside what the president of the Russian Federation says. Specifically, the Russian peacekeepers in Artsakh told us that after 2022 they did not know what they would do. Their mandate was not clearly defined in any situation.
We have many questions for the Russian side, the answer to which we have not yet received, because there was no dialogue in this regard. There are those questions, and we will get their answers one day, but the main actor and beneficiary, in fact, at that time were the authorities of Armenia, it was Armenia, it was Artsakh. Detail-by-detail clarification was important for our side. We should clarify that. Was that clarification made? No? If you are the honest and sincere prime minister of the “people”, why would you stand up and say:
“People, you know, Russia doesn’t inspire confidence in me, Russia doesn’t go for clarification. What should we do, people, should we accept this or not?” Then maybe Artsakh would have responded, maybe the decision would have been different, or maybe after that announcement, Russia would have clarified the mandate, and we would have understood what will happen in the future. So, it is very easy to make accusations, but when there is a problem in your house, when people are fighting each other in your house, you don’t go, you bring your neighbor to separate you. That problem was in our house, and basically, the authorities of Armenia wanted to smash our head. That’s how it works. And for that, they should have brought the neighbor, who should have just looked from the side, and then when he saw that no, it is not possible to settle all this, he would leave and go,” commented Metakse Hakobyan.
Full interview in the video.
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Disruption Applied by the Catholicos of All Armenians on the Basis of the Court’s Decision
April 10, 2026
Lawyer Ara Zohrabyan reports. “As you know, RA investigative committee (investigator Ara Avagyan) on 14.02.2026 made a decision and applied the prohibition of absence to the Catholicos of All Armenians as a preventive measure.
Due to that ban, as well as the refusal of permission to travel to Georgia by the investigator, the Catholicos of All Armenians could not participate in the holy ceremony of the funeral of Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia Ilia II.
The said decision of the investigator was appealed to the superior prosecutor. RA General Prosecutor’s Office (prosecutor Khachatur Galstyan) made a decision to reject the complaint. After the prosecutor’s refusal, a complaint was submitted to the court.
Today, 10.04.2026, the criminal court of the first instance of general jurisdiction of the city of Yerevan (judge Ani Danielyan) made a decision to satisfy the appeal of the defender of the Catholicos of All Armenians. Based on the court’s decision, the restraining order applied to the Catholicos of All Armenians is subject to cancellation.”
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