Before fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh, Lilit Sargsyan managed to save two “sacred” heirlooms: a family-woven carpet, now ripped with age, and earrings crafted with silver coins from her great grandmother’s taraz, a traditional Armenian headpiece.
The 36-year-old single mother and school teacher was among the 150,000 indigenous Armenians forcibly displaced from their homeland in late September, when Azerbaijan violated a ceasefire brokered in 2020 to launch a military offensive on the territory, which is internationally recognised as part of its borders.
“The first thing that affected me mentally was that road, which seemed like a death march,” Sargsyan told openDemocracy.
