Your Namak for Friday, December 3
Two Armenian POWs return home, Azerbaijan fires on Nagorno-Karabakh village and Syunik residents face growing humanitarian crisis.
Hi there, here’s your weekly briefing of Armenian news in English, curated, reported and fact-checked by journalists Astrig Agopian and Maral Tavitian.
Azerbaijan Opens Fire on Nagorno-Karabakh Village
On December 2, the Azerbaijani Armed Forces opened fire on the village of Karmir Shuka in the Martuni region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The Human Rights Ombudsman of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) Gegham Stepanyan reported that the shootings directly targeted civilian residences, although no material or human losses were recorded. Stepanyan stated that the incident underscored the need to remove Azerbaijani military posts from the immediate vicinity of peaceful Armenian settlements.
Two Armenian POWs Return Home
On November 26, two Armenian prisoners of war captured by Azerbaijan returned to Armenia. According to the Armenian Ministry of Defense, the two repatriated captives were born in 2000 and 1993.
Leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia Meet in Sochi
On November 26, the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia met in Sochi to discuss the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh. The parties adopted a joint statement reaffirming their common will to observe the provisions of the November 9, 2020 ceasefire agreement ending the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. In the statement, Russia once again declared its commitment to brokering peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan. There was no mention of Karabakh’s political status, nor other details concerning additional topics discussed at the meeting.
A Year After War, Syunik Residents Greatly Impacted
Civilians in the Chakaten village of Syunik, in the southeast of Armenia, have had no reliable water supply since the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. The Armenian Human Rights Defender Arman Tatoyan published a statement after visiting the border village on November 29, explaining that “the Azerbaijani armed servicemen cut the water of these families after their deployment in the areas without any legal ground.” Due to the presence of Azerbaijani checkpoints on the road connecting Chakaten with the city of Kapan, Tatoyan said some village residents can no longer access their jobs.
Sonya Avagyan: Meet the designer working to make a name for Armenian fashion
“I would like people all over the world to be able to say: ‘Oh yeah, Armenian fashion.’”
Sonya Avagyan is as comfortable in a trendy Yerevan restaurant mingling with en vogue artists as she is in the mud in a Nagorno-Karabakh village surrounded by locals who cannot believe how well she has mastered their dialect.
That’s probably what it takes to be a fashion designer and social entrepreneur in Armenia. Born in 1995 in Yerevan, Sonya was only 17 years old when she started her own business, making and selling custom T-shirts.
“My babysitter had a knitting machine and it was a huge excitement for me. I was intrigued by textiles at a very young age,” Sonya says.
After graduating from high school, she studied fashion design at the Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts. Early on, Sonya sought to combine her creative talent with social impact. She moved the production of her shirts to regions outside Armenia’s capital, working with local artisans and training them in quality control.
What began as a small project grew into her eponymous clothing and jewelry brand, which she founded in 2014. She understood the power of social media to take customers inside her creative journey and position Armenia on the global market.
From Gyumri to Stepanakert, and passing through all the provinces in between, Sonya gathers inspiration from everyday life. Her goal is to establish production bases throughout the country that specialize in different aspects of the design process.
“They could do sewing in one village and thread-making in another village, and that’s what I am pretty much trying to set up at the moment,” she says.
In 2018, the United Nations office in Armenia invited her to consult as an expert on textile development throughout the country. She dreams of converting Armenia into a production hub, with the goal of investing in economically isolated villages, many of which suffer from depopulation due to scarce jobs.
Sonya aspires to craft a fashion culture that leverages local talent and materials instead of targeting large-scale production for major companies. Her products are hand-crafted utilizing traditional Armenian techniques and high-quality textiles.
“We need to learn how to make our ideas reality and sell them, and pay proper salaries to our workers, not just rely on those mass markets, because that industry is not going to go well,” Sonya says. “For environmental purposes, we need to reshape our way of producing and selling in the fashion industry.”
Sonya has adopted an environmentally conscious approach to her own clothing line, using exclusively biodegradable and natural fibers and decentralizing production.
Her latest project incorporates found objects from the Askeran region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Sonya extracts natural sea lilies by hand from fossilized rock formations in the village of Astghashen. Millions of years ago, a body of water existed where the village is now located, and the star-shaped fossils are the remains of sea lilies. The stars have become a fixture of Sonya’s minimalist necklaces and earrings.
“Especially when it comes to jewelry, I like when it is natural and easy and you just put materials in the right place,” Sonya says. Her customers always ask whether she alters the shape of the stones. “But no it’s nature! It’s even more incredible,” she says.
After a limited release of her jewelry collection, Sonya will turn her focus back to clothing, her passion and area of specialization. With her brand, she aims to craft a new image of Armenian luxury fashion built on traditional craftsmanship.
“In Armenia, we have a very weak fashion culture, because for many years, clothing and fashion with an artistic and crafts purpose or story were undervalued,” Sonya says. “Clothes or jewelry that people wear are only to show their social status to look good or say something about their personality.”
Sonya believes that people must reimagine what it means to create uniquely Armenian art. “Creating something Armenian does not mean just taking religious symbols and putting them somewhere,” she says. “That is not creating.”
She encourages Armenians to look inward for inspiration and ideas, and take a fresh interpretation of ancient customs.
“We have a really amazing heritage. We should research it and then create new things, inspired by them, but which are modern and work for today’s world.”
To read: Love and War in Artsakh, a collection of testimonies of Armenian couples who met and fell in love during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War.
To watch: The Desire to Live, a docu-series created by a female director from Nagorno-Karabakh, Mariam Avetisyan, which highlights the lives of residents impacted by war. Her film of the same name won “Best Indigenous Peoples Film” and “Best Feature Documentary Director” at the Cannes World Film Festival.
To listen: Der Voghormya, a beautiful rendition of the famous Armenian hymn by Krista Marina Apardian. The Armenian-American artist found a short clip of her grandmother Ardemis Shekerdemian singing, and sampled it with her.
That’s it for today, see you next week!
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