ამბავი
Bright Love, a Tale from Stepanakert
It was a kids’ game like any other - a mysterious object unearthed in the hen coop, children trying to understand what is was, a hammer to break it. Then, an explosion and it all went dark for six-year old Artak Beglaryan. It has been dark ever since.
It was the 7th of April in 1995, when that landmine left Beglaryan blind - barely one year after the ceasefire that stopped the open warfare in Nagorno Karabakh, unexploded devices still dotted the region. Now 29, Beglaryan has turned the loss of his eyesight to his advantage as he grew resilient and has become who he is today - though maybe not the person he would have loved, or tried, to become when he was a child.
"I never thought that a disability could hinder [my] desire to create a family,” he says. “I always believed that if I’d fall for someone, then she would take me the way I was - with all my advantages and disadvantages,” says Beglaryan who in June 2017 got married with ArmineVardanyan.
His sight impairment did not stop Beglaryan from getting a high education. The press officer of Prime Minister Arayik Harutyunyan pursued his studies from Yerevan to London and the US. He is the first Armenian with impaired vision to have climbed Mount Ararat, Armenians’ national symbol.