A memorial mural of Albert Hovhannisyan has been removed from a wall at Yerevan’s Victory Park, just days before the sixth anniversary of the start of the 2020 Artsakh War, citizens reported.
Albert was 19 when he was killed on October 8, 2020. A photograph of him firing an artillery gun during the war quickly spread across Armenia and the diaspora, becoming one of its defining images. At a time when the country was waiting for news from the front, that photograph came to represent resistance, determination and the hope of victory.
The mural kept that image, and everything it came to stand for, visible in Yerevan. Six years later, it has been removed.
The removal comes amid the continued clearing of murals dedicated to fallen Armenian soldiers from public spaces in the capital. In June, Yerevan Municipality announced that murals and graffiti would require prior authorization, including submission of a sketch and an explanation of the work’s purpose and content. Authorities have also cited renovation works and concerns over vandalism when explaining the removal of soldiers’ portraits from underpasses.
Those regulations may explain the city’s policy toward murals. They do not diminish the meaning of the memorials being removed.
These were not simply drawings on walls. They carried the faces of young men who fought and died for Armenia and Artsakh, keeping their sacrifice present in the everyday life of the city. After the forced displacement of Artsakh’s Armenian population in 2023, those memorials took on even greater weight, becoming among the remaining public links to a homeland, a struggle and a generation marked by war and loss.
Albert was posthumously awarded the “For Courage” medal in 2020 and, a year later, the “Hero of Artsakh” title, which carries the “Order of the Golden Eagle.”
His mural may be gone, but what Albert represented cannot be removed with it.
They may take your face from a wall, Albert, but they cannot erase your courage, your sacrifice or the memory you left behind.
We will remember.
