Virtually all of the murals were painted on walls and buildings across the city after the 2020 war with Azerbaijan that left at least 3,833 Armenians dead. Many of them also appeared in other parts of Armenia.
In June alone, at least five images of fallen soldiers were scrubbed from the walls of underground pedestrian passes in downtown Yerevan. One of them depicted Haykaz Mkrtchian, a 19-year-old conscript who was critically wounded and died on the last day of the six-week war. The municipal authorities claimed at the time that the walls were cleaned as part of a renovation of the underpasses.
The underpass that displayed Mkrtchian’s image has still not been renovated. Many of its stair treads remain broken and wall tiles torn off or in a state of disrepair. The murals of two other fallen soldiers, Gevorg Asatrian and Hovannes Khoderian, painted there were found erased on Friday.
The authorities thus ignored an uproar caused last week by their removal of another mural based on an iconic Armenian photograph of the 2020 war. It showed soldier Albert Hovannisian firing a howitzer a few days after being killed in action. Hovannisian’s father Artak condemned the authorities as “blasphemers.”
Armenia - A wall in Yerevan before and after the removal of a mural of Albert Hovannisian.
“It is very clear where that toxic wind is blowing from,” he wrote on Facebook. “No matter how much you delete the pictures, you cannot erase people's memories.”
Officials from the municipal administration rushed to meet with Artak Hovannisian. He said they promised to create a different memorial to his son.
The head of Yerevan’s central administrative district, Petros Petoyan, insisted on Friday that the murals are being wiped out as part of renovation works.
“There is no specific directive to remove them,” Petoyan said.
Opposition figures and other critics of the Armenian government maintain, however, the murals are disappearing on Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s orders. They claim that Pashinian wants to make Armenians forget about Karabakh and their soldiers who died for it as part of his submissive policy towards Azerbaijan.
Pashinian pointedly declined to issue a statement on September 27 on the sixth anniversary of the outbreak of the disastrous war. The Armenian Public Television run by his loyalists aired a two-hour pop concert that day, causing outrage among many Armenians. The state-funded broadcaster issued an apology after the outcry.