"Three-Ruble Criers"

What «Երեքմանեթանոց Լաց» Means In Armenian

LANGUAGE «Երեքմանեթանոց լաց դնող» — literally "a three-ruble crier" — is one of the most cutting insults in colloquial Armenian. It refers to the historical practice in some traditional Armenian communities of hiring poor women to mourn at funerals for a fixed token sum. By the 20th century the phrase had become a metaphor for any performance of grief that the speaker considers fake, paid for, or politically staged.

For a Prime Minister of Armenia to apply «երեքմանեթանոց լաց դնող» — particularly in the dismissive verb form «լաց դնողների մասին» — to the citizens who came to Tsitsernakaberd on April 24 is not a casual word choice. It is a deliberate, calibrated political insult that says: the people who mourned the Genocide yesterday were not real mourners. They were performers. Their grief was scripted. The whole national commemoration was theatre.

Tsitsernakaberd — Why The Site Matters

Tsitsernakaberd (Ծիծեռնակաբերդ — "Swallow Fortress") is the Armenian Genocide Memorial Complex on a hill overlooking Yerevan. It was built between 1965 and 1967 — at the height of Soviet-era restrictions on Armenian national expression — as the central memorial site to the 1.5 million Armenians killed in the 1915 Genocide by the Ottoman Turkish state. Every April 24, hundreds of thousands of Armenians from Yerevan, the regions, and the diaspora climb the hill in a silent procession to lay flowers at the eternal flame.

The annual procession is the most ritually significant single act of Armenian national mourning. Tears at Tsitsernakaberd are not theatrical. They are the most viscerally real expressions of grief any Armenian family can produce, because nearly every Armenian family carries direct generational descent from someone the Ottoman state killed in 1915.

For the sitting Prime Minister of Armenia to call those tears «երեքմանեթանոց լաց» — paid, fake, three-ruble — and to do it in a video he personally published the day after the procession — is an act of contempt for the most foundational Armenian collective memory ritual.

The April 25 Choreography

Who Pashinyan Just Called Fake

The Tsitsernakaberd procession on April 24, 2026, included — by long-standing Armenian tradition that has not been broken since 1965 — the following groups:

• Armenian families who lost direct ancestors in the 1915 Genocide.
• Diaspora Armenian visitors from the United States, France, Russia, the Middle East, Argentina, Australia, and elsewhere who time their visits to be at Tsitsernakaberd on April 24.
• Armenian Apostolic Church clergy at all hierarchy levels, often led by the Catholicos of All Armenians.
• Veterans of the 2020 war and families of soldiers killed in 2020 — for whom the genocide commemoration is not abstract history but adjacent to personal recent loss.
• Families of Armenian citizens currently held in Baku (Vardanyan and others).
• Displaced Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians (~120,000 people who reached Armenia in 2023) for whom Tsitsernakaberd is now also a memorial to a more recent ethnic cleansing.
• Foreign diplomats, journalists, and visiting heads of state on official visits.

The Prime Minister has, in calling the mourners «երեքմանեթանոց լաց դնողներ», called every member of every group above either a paid actor or a fool taken in by paid actors. There is no middle reading. The phrase admits no neutral interpretation.

The Diaspora Reaction Will Be Severe

The Armenian diaspora — six million-plus Armenians outside the Republic, the great majority descended from 1915 Genocide survivors — uses April 24 as the most politically active day of the year globally. Diaspora media monitor every Yerevan signal on April 24-25 closely. A Prime Minister of Armenia calling Tsitsernakaberd mourners «երեքմանեթանոց լաց» on April 25 will reach Armenian-American, Armenian-French, Armenian-Russian, and Armenian-Lebanese media within hours.

OWL's reading of the diaspora reception register: this video is not a marginal misstep. It is the kind of statement that diaspora institutions will cite for years as evidence that the Pashinyan government's normalisation-with-Turkey project has reached the point of denigrating Armenian collective memory itself. Diaspora donations to Civil Contract-aligned causes, diaspora political support for the June 7 election, and diaspora lobbying of Western capitals on Armenia-related questions will all incorporate this April 25 statement.

The Pattern, Compressed

OWL has documented, across one nine-day window (April 17-25, 2026), the following Pashinyan + Civil Contract acts:

• Apr 17: Calls opposition voters «շուն ու շանգյալ» (dog and whore).
• Apr 18: Tsitsernakaberd "the shade of the stones is different" (admission of memorial-stone destruction).
• Apr 21: Calls Etchmiadzin «աղտոտված, ախտահարված» (polluted, infected); calls detained Karapetyan «Putin's slave».
• Apr 23: Formally freezes CSTO; attacks "candle money" Church finances; calls Karapetyan «Kaluga oligarch».
• Apr 24: Condemns flag-burners; Simonyan says «shameful»; announces April 25 BBQ.
• Apr 25 (today): Calls April 24 Tsitsernakaberd mourners «երեքմանեթանոց լաց դնողներ» (paid fake criers); holds the BBQ.

Nine days. One political project. Each action compounds the previous. The April 25 statement is the most direct attack yet on the foundational Armenian collective-memory ritual.

What An Opposition Response Could Do

The consolidated opposition («Ապրելու Երկիր» + «Հզոր Հայաստան») has, since the April 21 MoU, the political mandate to respond. The April 25 statement gives them a maximally clear contrast: Civil Contract calls Genocide mourners «երեքմանեթանոց լաց», the consolidated opposition would not. That is a one-sentence campaign frame for the next 43 days to June 7.

Whether they will use it with equivalent force is a political question. OWL's prediction: yes. The April 25 statement is too cleanly insulting to mainstream Armenian sensibility for any opposition platform to ignore.

What OWL Will Track

• The full text and exact context of the Pashinyan video — when, where, to whom.
• Catholicos response from Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin.
• Diaspora organisation statements (ANCA, AAA, AGBU, Eastern Prelacy, Western Prelacy, French CCAF, Russian Union of Armenians).
• «Ապրելու Երկիր» + «Հզոր Հայաստան» response.
• The actual khorovats event itself — attendance, photos, framing.
• Whether Civil Contract walks back, doubles down, or stays silent.

Cross-References Inside OWL

• Condemn The Citizens, Book The Barbecue
• The PM Who Defends Turkey But Has Never Defended an Artsakh Church
• Turkey Officially Demands Armenia Punish The April 24 Flag-Burners
• "Holy Etchmiadzin Is Polluted, Infected"
• The Stones of Tsitsernakaberd
• The Three From The Sauna

Sources

• Pashinyan video published April 25, 2026 (armtimes.com, bavnews.am).
• Historical record of Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex 1965-2026.
• Armenian colloquial-language record on the «երեքմանեթանոց լաց» idiom.
• Records of the April 24 procession itself, photographs, and crowd estimates.

OWL is an anonymous collective of Armenian journalists. We take no money from any political party, bloc, movement, oligarch, foreign government, or foundation. On April 25 we report a Prime Minister calling Armenian Genocide mourners fake on the day after Genocide Remembrance Day. The voters of June 7 are entitled to that record.

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