Author: Emil Lazarian

When the war in Nagorno-Karabakh came to an end, Vicken Euljekjian was captured by Azerbaijani soldiers. In an interview with Blankspot, he recounts his 1 891 days in captivity, the years he spent in solitary confinement, and the freedom he ultimately regained.

Av RASMUS CANBÄCK 14 juni, 2026

It was late in the evening on 9 November 2020 when news broke that the war in Nagorno-Karabakh had come to an end. At the time, Vicken Euljekjian, an Armenian-Lebanese citizen who had emigrated to the breakaway region, was in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan.

His home near the town of Shushi — known as Shusha in Azerbaijani — was about to fall under Azerbaijani control. He believed he had until 1 December to clear out his belongings.

What he did not realize was that the village where his house was located was not covered by that timetable. Hoping to salvage as much as possible, he returned home with his friend Maral. It proved a costly mistake. Azerbaijani troops detained them both and quickly separated them.

The next day, the beatings began.

“First they hit my right ear. Then the back of my neck. The blows were so hard that my ears started ringing,” Euljekjian recalls.

Only later did he realize that he was being held at a detention facility in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku.

“Since then, I have had hearing problems. I have lost between 40 and 50 percent of my hearing in both ears. My spine was damaged so badly that I now need support around my neck to hold my head upright.”

We meet at a café in Yerevan. Two childhood friends from Lebanon accompany him, having travelled to Armenia to support him. He leans forward as far as his neck brace allows in order to hear the questions. He repeats them to make sure he has understood them correctly.

During the final period of his imprisonment, he was confined to a wheelchair. At least he no longer needs it, but moving quickly remains difficult.

Vicken Euljekjian, 46, moved to Nagorno-Karabakh in 2018 to start his own business. Photo: Rasmus Canbäck

Released on 14 January this year, Euljekjian spent a total of 1,891 days — five years and two months — in Azerbaijani custody. His friend Maral was released just a few months after the arrest.

Today, his medical treatment is being financed through donations, support from friends, and assistance from an opposition political party.

“There is both a lot and very little to say about my time in Azerbaijan,” Vicken Euljekjian says.

Prison, he explains, is monotonous. Every day resembles the last. The memories that remain most vivid come from the first seven months of his captivity, when he was awaiting trial. At the time, he was being held at a State Security Service detention facility in Baku, not far from the city’s iconic Flame Towers.

“For about 20 days, the Red Cross managed to arrange for me to share a cell with another Armenian prisoner. It was the only time during those years that I was not alone. I had started hallucinating. I saw my mother in dreams. But it did not last long.”

The arrangement ended, he says, because Azerbaijani investigators had come to view him as a Lebanese terrorist.

A Lebanese terrorist?

“Yes. When they captured me, I gave them my Armenian passport. Somehow they looked into my background and discovered that I was from Lebanon. I confirmed it. Then they told me they would charge me as a Lebanese mercenary.”

Euljekjian says he tried to explain that his family were descendants of survivors of the Armenian Genocide.

“I told them, ‘I am Armenian by blood. My grandparents survived the genocide of 1915.’”

There are currently more than 250 political prisoners in Azerbaijan. Armenian detainees are rarely included in these counts. Today, an estimated 19 Armenians remain in Azerbaijani custody.

According to him, the investigator responded that he had never seen an Armenian passport.

“I had handed it to him only minutes earlier. It was lying on the desk in front of him. But he repeated that he had never seen it and locked it away in a safe. It was as if the passport had been erased from existence.”

Soon afterwards, he says, he learned that the authorities intended to film a video portraying him as a foreign mercenary. Because he already understood Turkish, which is closely related to Azerbaijani, he could follow much of what was being said.

“They accused me of receiving $2,500 a month from the Armenian government. At that point I gave up. I told them: ‘OK, do whatever you want.’ I understood that they were not interested in the truth.”

He nevertheless attempted to defend himself during the trial.

“But it felt as though the verdict had already been decided. The whole thing was theatre. You can talk until dawn and try to defend yourself, but in the end it changes nothing.”

He was sentenced to 20 years in prison and transferred to Gobustan Prison, a high-security facility around 50 kilometres southwest of Baku.

Just beyond the prison walls lie the famous Gobustan rock carvings, a popular tourist attraction. Inside, however, was a very different reality.

Five months after returning from more than five years in captivity, Vicken Euljekjian says the process of rebuilding his life has been slow. Photo: Rasmus Canbäck

For decades, the prison has been criticized internationally for poor conditions. In its most isolated section, in a small cell with the number 85 on the door, the third cell from the eastern flank of the building, where he would spend the next four years, Euljekjian lived entirely alone.

When asked whether he was allowed to leave his cell, he looks surprised.

“Leave the cell? No.”

Not once?

“No. Never.”

The cell measured roughly two and a half by four metres. A small window near the ceiling allowed in some daylight.

“You have to understand how bad it was,” he says. “The air was humid – suffocating. In summer the heat was unbearable. There were mice everywhere. It was the worst place you can imagine.”

The loneliness set in quickly.

He imagined cracks in the walls widening into escape routes. Perhaps the damp damage would soften the concrete. He pictured life beyond the prison walls: tourists visiting the nearby rock carvings, his family gathering for dinners without him.

The sense of loss deepened as one piece of bad news followed another. One by one, people close to him died, and he was unable to attend their funerals.

First, his father passed away. Then his brother. When his mother died as well, without him having the chance to say goodbye, it felt as though the walls were closing in around him. He tried to remember the last words he had spoken to them. He hoped they had been something positive.

Outside the prison, his wife Linda struggled to keep the family together. His late brother’s children moved in with her. Both children of Vicken and Linda were forced to abandon their studies to help earn enough money for the family to survive.

“A large part of my time in prison was spent imagining that I was helping my family, making sure there was food on the table,” he says. “It was a very difficult situation for my wife. All the bills that had to be paid.”

For him, imagination became a routine.

Every small detail he learned about life on the outside was woven into an imagined world in which he could still participate. When he closed his eyes, he let conversations between family members play out in his mind. He thought about what he would have said at the funerals. He reconstructed the scenes, over and over again, inside his head.

The interview with Vicken Euljekjian was conducted with the assistance of an interpreter. Photo: Rasmus Canbäck

Could you communicate with other prisoners?

“I need to repeat this: it was the worst place. I could not speak to anyone. Other inmates at different quarters had access to a yard where they could walk. We who were having a life sentence had nothing like that.”

His gaze shifts for the first time during our conversation. Tears begin to form.

The water, he says, was green. The food was barely edible.

“Usually it was some mixture of pasta, buckwheat and flour with boiling water poured over it. The bread was the only thing I could eat.”

When representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross visited, he repeatedly asked them for one thing.

“Water. That was all I wanted.”

The delegates were foreign staff members working with the ICRC mission in Azerbaijan.

How often did they visit?

“According to the rules, about once a month. In reality, every 40 or 45 days. Maybe nine times a year.”

During the visits, he was allowed to speak with family members for two minutes.

“After four years, even that changed. We could no longer communicate through Red Cross channels and instead had to use a government telephone.”

Was that your only human contact?

“Yes. And they were only allowed into my cell. I was never allowed out.”

The visitors usually brought tomatoes and cucumbers. Occasionally, a tube of melted cheese.

“I asked for more cheese so I could put it on the bread, but they said it was not permitted. Once they brought me a cabbage. I marinated it in salt water and tried to preserve it. After that I was not allowed cabbage again.”

He also asked whether they could bring sausage or other protein-rich food.

“The prison governor claimed it might spoil. I told him I would eat it immediately. It made no difference.”

Eventually, Euljekjian told the ICRC delegates that there was little point in visiting him.

“Three tomatoes and two cucumbers were not worth it.”

Yet the visits continued.

“They would not listen to me, so I kept eating their tomatoes,” he says with a faint smile.

“As a foreigner, I had nobody to stand up for my rights. Whenever I complained to the Red Cross, they referred me to the prison administration. When I complained to the prison administration, they referred me back to the Red Cross.”

According to Euljekjian, Azerbaijani prisoners enjoyed significantly better conditions. Their families could visit more frequently and many cells contained refrigerators.

What kept you alive?

“There was only one thing: the idea that I might eventually get out.”

And a Bible.

“That was the only book I had. I brought it with me. There were some Russian books in the prison, but I do not speak Russian.”

By late 2025, he began to sense that something might be changing. During one visit from ICRC on Christmas day, he learned that discussions were taking place about his deteriorating health.

The injuries he says he sustained during the first days of detention had worsened to the point where he needed a wheelchair. Without adequate medical care, walking had become increasingly difficult.

Before dawn on 14 January 2026, guards suddenly woke him.

“They told me to pack my things.”

He protested.

“I asked them to at least wait until sunrise so I could see what I was packing.”

The guards refused.

“I wanted to know the truth. If I was being transferred to another prison, I needed to think about what to take with me. If I was going home, I would need nothing.”

Eventually, prison officials told him that he was being released.

“I said, ‘Then I do not need anything at all.’”

He smiles.

“But they suggested I at least put on my shoes.”

He was taken to the Lachin Corridor, the road that between 2020 and 2023 served as the only connection between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The route became internationally known after it was blocked for nine months before Azerbaijan’s September 2023 offensive, which triggered the mass exodus of more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians from the region.

Together with three other Armenian detainees — Gevorg Sujyan, Davit Davtyan, and Vagif Khachatryan — he was handed over to Armenian authorities.

Unlike the others, who had family in Armenia, Euljekjian had spent most of his life in Lebanon. Upon arrival, he was taken directly to hospital. He was allowed to stay longer than needed, while finding a solution for accommodation.

Since then, he says, he has received support from the opposition party Armenian Revolutionary Federation and from members of the party’s Lebanese branch. They also helped pay for airline tickets for his wife, Linda, who had, throughout the years, fought hard to raise awareness of her husband’s case.

Today, Vicken Euljekjian lives with his daughter in an apartment in the suburbs of Yerevan. His wife, Linda, remains in Lebanon, where she works. Photo: Rasmus Canbäck

What was it like seeing your family again?

“Almost six years had passed since I last saw my daughter. It took another four months after my release before she could come here. We simply did not have the money.”

He pauses.

“Seeing her again is the best thing that has happened to me. She was a teenager when I was captured. Now she is 24.”

How has prison changed you?

“I would never allow it to change me,” he says. “I am still the same person I was before.”

Toppbild: Only a few times during the interview does Vicken Euljekjian pause. It is when he speaks about his years in Azerbaijani prison. Photo: Rasmus Canbäck

Vill du tipsa reportern? Mejla till [email protected]. Följ gärna hans löpande bevakning om det armeniska valet den 7 juni på WhatsApp.

Canbäck har skrivit om Sydkaukasien för Blankspot sedan 2020. Hans bok Varje dag dör jag långsamt handlar om konflikten i Nagorno-Karabach mellan åren 2020 och 2023.

Av RASMUS CANBÄCK

—

June 15, 2026

David Staniunas, Presbyterian Historical Society

Presbyterian News Service

With the 227th General Assembly preparing to act on two overtures on genocide, we consider that the Church has in the past acted to support survivors of genocide, well before the term was coined.

Armenian refugee camps, ‘8000 Armenians,’ from R. E. Magill photograph albums, 1919, Pearl Digital Collections. 

Specifically, Presbyterians took great interest in defending Christian refugees during the Armenian genocide. Generations of survivors found spiritual homes and educations in Presbyterian mission-related institutions. Through one significant Armenian’s estate, the Church continues to support Christians throughout the Middle East. While a succession of General Assemblies produced statements and sent telegrams, the long response to genocide, in this case, unfolded over lifetimes, elsewhere. 

The PCUSA Syria Mission lay entirely within the Ottoman Empire, and in 1914 was fervently evangelical and optimistic. The mission’s hope was that the ‘İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti‘, then ruling as a dictatorship, would unfetter the evangelization of Muslims: “not only may the missionaries press their work among the Mohammedans, but that if they do not, doubt is raised as to the integrity of their purpose.” 

‘The Confines of Armenia,’ from R. E. Magill photograph albums, Pearl Digital Collections.

The next year’s mission report notes that communication with the field was cut off by the war, but goes on to write, presumptively: “The entrance of Turkey into the European conflict gave occasion for ministry to the suffering people in the name of Christ, and it has turned to a great evangelistic advantage.” By 1916 the mission reports that, despite the Allied blockade of the Eastern Mediterranean and the official Ottoman censorship of mail, it has been able to serve as a de facto bank for Syrians with families abroad, making more than $1 million in remittances in a year.  

By the same token, as Henry Gorman describes in “American Ottomans,” Presbyterian mission workers in Syria in the second half of the 19th century scrupulously sought the favor of the authorities. This included malign acts. In 1916, Henry Bliss, president of the Syrian Protestant College, telegraphed a list of the names of Armenian students at SPC to Ahmed Djemal Pasha, military governor of Syria, “even though he was aware of the ongoing Armenian genocide.” 

It’s only in 1917 that the Assembly records its awareness of the Ottoman slaughter of Armenians, surprisingly, in the report of the North China Mission: “The sorrows of Armenia have been felt in An Su, and old ladies who earn one or two coppers a day for spinning and weaving have contributed as much as 20 coppers apiece to relieve that distress.” For its part, the Syria mission reports some concern that, should the United States break off relations with the Ottomans, “the property of the Mission might be imperiled.” Missionaries, with the help of U.S. ambassador Henry Morgenthau, were offered safe passage back to the States. The vast majority declined. “They are remaining at the posts and the work is going on uninterruptedly.” 

Ruins of Kharberd/Harput and Orfu/Urfa, and Armenian family returning, from R. E. Magill photograph albums, 1919, Pearl Digital Collections.

The Syria Mission in 1918 reported distributing $2 million in remittances from Syrians in diaspora, and, despite noting scant messages making it out of the country, remained ruthlessly hopeful: “The coming of peace will be the signal for the Christian Churches of America to manifest their gratitude to God … by renewing their endeavor to give back to Christ the land which gave Christ to the world.” The Assembly as a whole, acting on a request from the National Armenian Relief Committee, passed a resolution expressing “deep sympathy with the suffering Armenians, Syrians, Persians, and other races of Western Asia,” and recommended Presbyterians continue to give funds to relief efforts.  

Actual news would trickle out only after the Armistice of October 1918. The 1919 report of the Syria Mission to the Assembly tells of mission stations serving their neighbors and incoming refugees, suffering famine and malaria early on, influenza later. Mission schools became refugee shelters. In Sidon, Presbyterians maintained two soup kitchens, serving 500 people a day.   

The Mission also reports the whereabouts of two mission workers whom they’d lost contact — Charles Dana of Beirut and William S. Nelson of Tripoli. The BFM reports that both were “deported and imprisoned because of their relief work, which was exceedingly distasteful to the Turkish government.” 

Charles and Lanice Dana, RG 360. Presbyterian Historical Society.

Charles Dana was a Montanan, an accountant by trade, who served one three-year term at the Syrian Protestant College (today’s American University of Beirut) from 1907 to 1910 teaching shorthand, bookkeeping, and business methods, before returning stateside. Reappointed in 1913 as treasurer of the American Mission Press, he returned to Beirut with his wife Lanice.  

Dana and the American Press operated a relief fund of some three million dollars (about $90 million in today’s dollars). Asked in June 1916 by the mission magazine Assembly Herald for highlights of Syria mission work, Dana was, as a person in charge of significant funds might be, circumspect: “The less limelight, spotlight, or highlight on the work of the Press, the better.”  

Refugees on train, Turkey, May 1919; from Magill photo albums, Pearl Digital Collections.

His letter to the Herald wouldn’t arrive until September 1919. Dana was detained eight times by Ottoman authorities, and finally ordered to leave Beirut. Authorities seized records of the Syria-Lebanon mission. Charles, Lanice, and their four-year- old daughter, Dorothy, headed toward Istanbul by train. The family lived freely there until July 17, 1918, when Charles was, by his own account, arrested and put in a “secret prison” where he shared a cell with “an insane Turk and an Egyptian spy.” With the intervention of the German naval attaché, he was released on Sept. 3. In Dana’s telling, the attaché told him that “the imprisonment was an act of reprisal for having aided persecuted Armenians.” 

It’s worth examining Dana’s testimony carefully because Christians in America frequently identified the Ottoman Empire as the enemy of its own people, Christian and Muslim, Arab and Armenian and Greek. (All this notwithstanding American Presbyterian accommodation and collaboration with Ottoman authorities in the half-century prior.) 

Left: refugees at work in Orfu/Urfa; Right: Interior Orfu Church, 5000 massacred here in 1894, from R. E. Magill photograph albums, Pearl Digital Collections.

Popular audiences regularly heard of the coming end of the “Sick Man of Europe” — in “The Armenians, or the People of Ararat,” M. C. Gabrelian argues that greater Armenian presence in the armies of the Sublime Porte would have saved it from the “inevitable dissolution into which it is swiftly falling on account of the indolent and obtuse character of the Mongolian Turk.” 

Writing of struggles to publish and evangelize in Anatolia and Iran, missionary magazine The Presbyterian reported in 1892, “The Turk never did believe much in tolerance, and never allows it where he can help it.” The 1919 Assembly rejoices at the end of the World War: “Words cannot express our thanks to God the Lord of Hosts for his great deliverance that he has given Syria and to us all from the tyranny of the Turks and their allies.”  

With relief at the end of the Great War, Presbyterians greeted the 20th century. In a second article, we find the shadow of the Armenian genocide over the next hundred years.