RFE/RL – Murals Of Fallen Soldiers Removed From Yerevan’s Streets

Virtually all of the murals were painted on walls and buildings across the city after the 2020 war with Azerbaijan that left at least 3,833 Armenians dead. Many of them also appeared in other parts of Armenia.

In recent days, at least five images of fallen soldiers were scrubbed from the walls of underground pedestrian passes in downtown Yerevan. One of them depicted Haykaz Mkrtchian, a 19-year-old conscript who was critically wounded and died on the last day of the six-week war. Also removed was a portrait of Robert Abajian, another soldier venerated in Armenia as a hero of four-day hostilities that broke out in Karabakh in 2016.

The municipal administration told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that the walls were cleaned as part of a renovation of the underpasses. Mkrtchian’s mother Anna dismissed the official explanation, linking the removal of the murals to Pashinian’s statements that Armenians should not have fought for Karabakh’s unification with their country.

“They want to erase everything that is connected to Artsakh even with the most invisible threads,” said Anna Mkrtchian.

Arega Hovsepian, a senior member of the main opposition Strong Armenia alliance, likewise claimed that murals are removed because Pashinian has promised Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to “erase our heroes and victories and everything Armenian from the memory of the Armenian people.”

“But he didn’t take into account the fact that the Armenian people have not lost their resilience and will not lose their memory,” she said in a social media video filmed against the backdrop of another underpass wall that bore until this week the images of three other fallen soldiers.

There are still murals in and outside the city center untouched by the authorities. A spokesperson for the Yerevan municipality did not deny that they too will be removed if the “renovation” works reach those public areas.

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