Karine Aghyekyan, a 63-year-old sniper and participant in three Artsakh wars, was buried with military honors on 31 January at the Yerablur military pantheon.
Mrs. Karine had died two days earlier of a heart attack in her home in Aghavno, which she had refused to leave.
Karine’s comrade-in-arms Kevork Patyalyan recalled that even during the first Artsakh war she had left her young children in Goris and gone up to the combat positions.
“At first she was in Ara’s detachment in Kornidzor, then in the Tigran Mets detachment. She took part in the April Four-Day War; at that time I was not with her, and in this war she was in the Goris reserve regiment, after which she also took part in the defense of Kashatagh and stayed in Aghavno village until the end and did not want to leave. She said, ‘If they are going to give Aghavno to the Turk anyway, I am not leaving,’ and so she did not leave. With explosives in her pocket, she would not come down from the positions to the house. She was very distressed, and probably died from that worry, because until then she had no health problems,” he told NEWS.am.
Mughegh Alaverdyan, the acting head of the Kashatagh district administration, also speaking about Mrs. Karine, said that she embodied the image of the perfect Armenian woman and mother.
“She is the image of the Armenian woman we so much need. I will never forget that at their very home we watched with classmates how she was patching up corpses so they could be buried. The last few times she had called about electricity problems, there were outages, and the conversation went roughly like this: ‘Dear boy, if the lights are not on in 5 minutes, I will give you a piece of my mind.’ That, at the moment, annoyed me, but at these moments I remember it with longing. She did what she had to do, and we have every reason to be proud,” he said.
