Raw & Unfiltered

Journalist Lusine Hovhannesyan recounts her personal memories as a university student during the first days of the Karabakh Movement. She writes, “We became beautiful and fell in love easily like young men and women living out their last days at the barricades and we sang songs of resilience in the streets of Yerevan.”

In the last 100 years, there have been hierarchies of identity and canonical approaches to definitions of "Armenian," especially as articulated, rationalized and promoted by elites, institutions and political parties in the Diaspora and in Armenia. This essay is not a study of identity per se, but about one of the aspects of identity – the “Armenian” bit of it.

In this exceptionally honest and candid article, Gevorg Ter-Gabrielyan writes about his impressions from the first few months of the Karabakh Movement 30 years ago, with words he did not have nor could find at the time.

In this first essay for EVN Report, Dr. Vahe Sahakyan of the University of Michigan seeks to address the issue of Armenian diaspora leadership by examining it in theoretical and comparative perspective. He asks, who are the diaspora leaders, and can they have multiple geographical or cultural identities and yet remain ethnically “unmixed?”

Over the course of the next two years, 20,000 13-year-old girls in Armenia are to receive the HPV vaccine free of charge before the Ministry of Health makes a decision for permanent implementation of the vaccine into the national plan.

When a massive earthquake rocked northern Armenia in 1988, EVN Report’s Vahram Ter-Matevosyan was a fifth grade student in Gyumri. In this personal essay, he recounts his experience of being trapped beneath the ruins of his school for 18 harrowing hours.

In this poignant essay, Lalai Manjikian writes about the frantic rhythm of managing a career and motherhood. The transition to motherhood, she writes, is not necessarily easy and nor is it the aestheticized perfect pastel images on social media. It is messy, painful, and exhausting, yet, interspersed with pockets of unimaginable heart-expanding joy.

Even as “Global Armenians” seem to be thriving around the world, they don’t appear to be thriving in the Republic of Armenia. Global Armenians, like the ocean-crisscrossing Armenian merchants of the 16th-18th centuries, contributed to vibrant Armenian communities around the globe, “preserving a nation is not the same as preserving a community,” writes Dr. Hratch Tchilingirian.

Armenia’s Ministry of Culture shut down an exhibit entitled ECLIPSE at the Tumanyan House Museum in Yerevan stating that it was ‘politicized’. Since the public no longer has the opportunity to physically go and see the exhibit, Narine Tukhikyan, the director of the Tumanyan House Museum, provided EVN Report with all the curated artifacts so that it could live on virtually.

After decades of moving from city to city, writer and journalist Paul Chaderjian ends up with a relic that has no place in his two suitcases of mere essentials. A personal story that comes full circle from orphanages in Aleppo to civil war Beirut to Fresno and New York to Doha and Istanbul.