On Jan. 7, 1920, the Hairenik — our mother paper — published a grid of classified ads. Each begins the same way: Guh pndrem — “I’m searching for.”
“I’m searching for my mother Anna, my brother Melkon and my sister Mariam Aivazian — natives of Kharpert. My uncle Boghos and sister Khuryet Mazgerdian. (my father’s name is Kevork). My address is 207 P.O. Box, Lynn, Mass., USA — Bedros Aivazian”
“I’m searching for Mesrob Sarkisian of Sepastia. In 1915, he went as a volunteer to the Caucasus Front. I have not heard from him since. Those who carry news, please do me a kindness by relaying it to me. — Yeranos Koroghlian, 207 East 29th St., New York City”
“I’m searching for my mother Varte; my sisters Gyulli, Keghetsik, Siranush; my brothers Aram, Garabed, and Yesayi Terdzagian (or Keloseyan), all natives of Evereg village in Gesaria. Alive or dead, I will pay the news bearer $25. — Harry Terzian, 37 Bow St., Somerville, Mass., USA”
Some of these ads ran for years. Until slowly, the generations re-ordered, and hope faded with the ink.
57 years later, on Jan. 8, 1977, three bombs exploded in Moscow, killing seven, injuring 37. For months, the public was kept in the dark. Following a secret trial, the KGB swiftly executed three young Armenian men: Stepan Zatikyan, Zaven Bagdasaryan and Hakob Stepanyan. They were members of the National United Party, founded April 24, 1966, 51 years to the date of the symbolic start of the Armenian Genocide.
What Bedros Aivazian, Yeranos Koroghlian and Harry Terzian were searching for in 1920 — scattered families, a dismembered nation — these men tried to rebuild through underground organizing.
They sought democracy, independence from Soviet rule and an acknowledgment of what had been taken from the Armenian people. They published a clandestine periodical called Paros (Lighthouse), a powerful metaphor for a now land-locked homeland. Soon after, the Soviet state would imprison the founders. Many who survived went on to lead an independent Armenia.
The first page of the Paros newspaper
But what actually happened on Jan. 8, 1977? Soviet dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov warned that the bombings might be KGB provocation. Former KGB colonel Oleg Gordievsky later said the three Armenian men were scapegoats. Witnesses said Zatikyan had an alibi.
We will likely never know the full truth. What we do know is how the story has been re-printed and re-purposed in the modern era.
In 2021, an Azerbaijani researcher tied to a Baku-based think tank published an article in the international journal, Modern Diplomacy, calling the 1977 bombings proof of Armenian “terrorist tradition” going back a century. He connects Zatikyan to ASALA to the 2020 Artsakh War, claiming that Armenian monuments honor terrorists and children are raised toward violence.
A bleak irony, considering the extensive documentation of Azerbaijani state-sponsored anti-Armenian propaganda embedded in its own education system. The article ends with a warning: watch the Armenians in your diaspora communities. They’re “collectively humiliated” now. They might turn dangerous.
This is how ink twists and stories become corrupted. And it’s published not on Aliyev’s website but in Western journals that purport to champion peace and democracy. These are the very institutions the Armenian government assures will bring stability.
Classified ads from diasporans searching for loved ones lost in the Armenian Genocide, published in the Hairenik on Jan. 7, 1920.
One year ago, my first editorial re-membered the resistance poem-turned-tune, Yernek te ays nor tarin (“If only this New Year”) would bring an end to the Armenian’s pain.
Another year has passed, and the pain is still on the page.
The world order is being rewritten daily. The veneer of decorum and human rights has been lifted. World leaders no longer pretend that borders and bombs are redrawn and r-ejected for moral reasons. Small men with imperial power negotiate our futures without pretense. Yet through all this, Armenia reads the same exhausted script the rest of the world has left behind.
From 1920 to 1977 to 2025: guh pndrenk. We’re still searching.
In 1920, we searched for bodies in the aftermath of our darkest chapter. In 1977, we searched for truth about three young lives ripped like weeds. In 2025, Artsakh is without her native people as her leaders languish in Baku’s dungeons, condemned to spectacle in sham trials.
Perhaps it’s time to speak louder than propaganda dressed as scholarship and stability. To insist that our dead — survivors or scapegoats, guilty or guileless — deserve better than being weaponized to justify our erasure.
If we stay in the footnotes, we consent to disappearing.
Yernek te ays nor tarin, azad shncher Hayastan.
If only, this new year, Armenia would breathe freely.
As the Weekly‘s former editor Rupen Janbazian wrote recently, let’s ensure that those who stay in the homeland to build it can breathe long enough to see it — even without a lighthouse to guide us.
And may peace, like pain on the page, come whole.
