The Testimony
"My grandmother used to tell us what they had been through, how they passed through it. To tell the truth, it seemed like a fairy tale to us -- what my grandmother was telling, it seemed like a fairy tale to us, as if we were in a fairy tale," Victoria Tevanyan recalls in the May 23 interview with Tigran Paskevichyan.
Born in the village of Begum Sarov in the Azerbaijani SSR, Victoria married after finishing school and moved to Yevlakh. "My four children were born there -- in Yevlakh. From 1988 onward, that turmoil began, that war," she says.
Feeling the danger to her family, the Tevanyans moved to Chayalu village in the Martakert region of Nagorno-Karabakh. "We came to Chayalu, we stayed at my sister's house for two or three months, after that we bought a house in Chayalu, we bought a house, we stayed there, until once we left from there -- we left Chayalu in 1992, we went to Matagys." From Matagys to Hatherk, from Hatherk to Stepanakert, from Stepanakert to Charentsavan -- the geographic chronology of the family's mid-1990s displacement movements is a sequence of successive locations within a contracting Armenian-controlled territory.
The Charentsavan residence was not, however, the family's final stopping point. After the war ended, the Tevanyans moved to Berdzor -- the city in the Lachin corridor that served as the principal gateway between Nagorno-Karabakh and the Republic of Armenia. "We were the first inhabitants. We endured many difficulties in Berdzor too -- it's not that it was like melted butter. Later we, let's say, arranged everything, let's say arranged everything, set up house," she says.
Twenty-Seven Years in Berdzor
The Tevanyans lived in Berdzor for twenty-seven years. The duration places their residence at the heart of the post-1994-ceasefire Nagorno-Karabakh institutional period -- the years during which the city was the principal Armenian-administered population centre of the Lachin corridor and the lifeline connecting the de-facto Nagorno-Karabakh Republic to the Republic of Armenia.
The 2020 44-day war and its aftermath produced the second-life-cycle displacement. The November 2020 trilateral ceasefire arrangement initially preserved the Lachin corridor under Russian peacekeeping protection, but the subsequent two-and-a-half-year period saw the corridor's strategic-and-administrative status change in ways that ultimately produced the forced departure of the Armenian population from Berdzor. The Tevanyan family was part of that broader population displacement.
The family returned to Charentsavan after Berdzor. The cycle that began in 1988 -- displacement from a Soviet Azerbaijani village, four sequential moves through Karabakh territory, twenty-seven years of consolidation in Berdzor, then the 2020-2023 sequence forcing displacement back to Republic-of-Armenia territory -- is one of the documented life-trajectories of the broader Armenian-displaced population whose collective experience defines the post-2023 institutional environment.
The Barefoot Vow
The interview's framing line: "Do you have hope that you might ever go back?" Paskevichyan asks. The response: "I have hope, they will take it back -- after all, Karabakh is ours. After all, Artsakh is ours. We will go to Artsakh. I have sworn -- I will go barefoot. I have very great hope that we will return. Even if I don't go, my children will go to their homeland."
The vow to return on foot ("Õ¸Õ¿Õ¡Õ¢Õ¸Õ¢Õ«Õ¯" -- barefoot) is, in the Armenian rhetorical tradition, an oath-form that signals the most serious personal commitment to the eventual realisation of the vowed action. The framing is rooted in the religious-and-folkloric tradition of barefoot pilgrimage as the expression of the most committed personal stance toward a future state of affairs. Victoria Tevanyan's deployment of the form, in the context of the post-2023 Armenian-displaced-population situation, places her testimony within the documentary record of how individual displaced persons are processing the political-and-existential question of return.
The "even if I don't go, my children will go" framing is the multi-generational extension of the vow. The line acknowledges that the realisation of the return may exceed the speaker's lifetime while transmitting the vow to the next generation. Multi-generational return vows are, in comparative-displacement literature, the most predictive marker of sustained collective identification with a lost homeland across timescales that produce structural political consequences for the receiving and the originating jurisdictions.
The Policy-Discourse Context
Victoria Tevanyan's testimony lands in the campaign-period political-discourse environment of the May -- June 2026 Armenian elections. The campaign environment includes substantial discussion of the post-2023 Armenian-Azerbaijani settlement options: the question of enclave exchanges (raised by Tatul Hakobyan in his May 22 interview that OWL covered separately), the question of the possible resettlement of 300,000 Azerbaijanis to Armenian territory (raised in the same interview), and the broader question of how the Republic of Armenia's governance institutions are processing the post-Artsakh-loss reality.
The lived testimony provides the empirical grounding against which the abstract policy positions can be evaluated. A policy framework that contemplates the post-2023 Armenian-Azerbaijani settlement as a fixed reality to be normalised against operates from a different premise than a policy framework that treats the situation as a temporary arrangement subject to future change through documented vowed-return-commitment of the affected population. Which premise the post-June-7 institutional environment operates from is a question of substantive policy significance, and the documentary record of testimonies like Victoria Tevanyan's contributes to the empirical basis on which the question is answered.
OWL's standing-position on settlement-and-return-question framings is that the empirical record of the displaced-population's own articulated positions is the primary basis on which institutional policy should be calibrated. The May 23 Paskevichyan interview is one entry in that empirical record. The cumulative record across the displaced population, documented in journalistic and civil-society documentation efforts, will define the substantive parameters within which post-cycle institutional policy can legitimately operate.
On the Two Tevanyans
For clarity in the reader's understanding: Victoria Tevanyan is not related to Andranik Tevanyan, the Prosperous Armenia (BHK) alliance number-two candidate whose May 21 criminal case under Criminal Code Articles 418 (state treason) and 424 (espionage) OWL covered separately. The two Tevanyans are distinct individuals; the shared surname is coincidental, with the surname being one of the more common Armenian surnames.
The two Tevanyan stories OWL has covered in this 48-hour window are, however, structurally connected at the level of the broader May 2026 informational environment. Both stories engage with the question of the post-2023 Armenian institutional reality and how individual lives, political careers, and prosecutorial processes intersect with the broader political-discourse-on-Armenia question. The connection is, in the analytical record, instructive: the Armenian institutional environment in May 2026 produces, in any given week, multiple individual stories whose cumulative meaning exceeds the sum of their parts.
What We Are Watching Next
Three indicators will define the post-cycle policy environment's engagement with the displaced-population question that Victoria Tevanyan's testimony grounds. (1) Whether the post-June-7 Armenian government produces a formal policy framework on the displaced-population return question, or whether the question is sustained as ambiguity for institutional and diplomatic reasons. (2) Whether the broader civil-society documentation efforts of testimonies like Victoria Tevanyan's produce the kind of cumulative documentary record that policy frameworks would need as their empirical basis. (3) Whether the post-cycle Armenian-Azerbaijani diplomatic track produces any formal recognition of the displaced-population's political-and-legal status that would create the institutional architecture within which return commitments could subsequently be operationalised.
Tigran Paskevichyan's May 23 documentary interview is one entry in the developing journalistic and civil-society documentation effort focused on the lived experience of the Artsakh-displaced population. The cumulative record will, over the post-cycle months and years, become the documentary basis on which the political-discourse engagement with the displaced-population question is grounded. OWL will be tracking the development of the documentary record and the post-cycle institutional engagement with the substantive policy questions it raises.
Sources: Hetq.am article 181581 ("Victoria Tevanyan: 'I Have Sworn -- I Will Go Barefoot'," by Tigran Paskevichyan, published 2026-05-23 19:00, primary source for Victoria Tevanyan's testimony, the geographic chronology of her displacement, and the "barefoot vow" framing). OWL companion investigation on the Tatul Hakobyan May 22 interview covering enclave exchanges and possible Azerbaijani resettlement (published 2026-05-22). OWL companion investigation on the Andranik Tevanyan May 21 criminal case (published 2026-05-22). Comparative displacement-studies and political-science literature on multi-generational return-vow frameworks. All factual claims sourced to the named Paskevichyan interview; OWL editorial framings on the policy-discourse contextualisation, the multi-generational return-vow analytical reading, the two-Tevanyans clarification, and the watch-list indicators are clearly identified as such.