Teacher: “What are you going to be when you grow up, Tigran?”

Tigran: “A soldier.”

Teacher: “Tigran, all boys become soldiers, what else are you going to be?”

Tigran: “I’ll just be a soldier…”

Tigran Abazyan, who died in the 44-day Artsakh war, was in first grade when he had the above dialogue with the teacher. Tigran was drafted into the army in January 2020. He took part in the intense battles of Hadrut and Jrakan, which were occupied by the enemy.

In one of the interviews, Tigran’s father, Vanik Abazyan, mentioned that he had gone to the Russian Federation to work abroad, and after a while, he also took Tigran with him. However, after the April 2016 war, the boy decided to return to his native country and serve in the Armenian army.

“He was constantly singing in the bathroom, ‘My brother and I are fighting.’ I said, ‘Tigran, don’t sing that song,’ but he would. He used to say, you know, I’m going to join the army, the war’s going to start. I don’t know what kind of premonition that was,” recounts his mother, Eleonora Vanyants, in her memoirs.

Tigran Abazyan received the rank of lieutenant on the battlefield. “We gave the soldier the rank of lieutenant because we felt he was capable of it. They saw that he was capable of making the right decisions,” said one of Tigran’s commanders in a conversation with Tigran’s father. Tigran was wounded in the back and later surrounded by several boys. They hid near the village of Vank. “Tigran and two others came out of hiding to find a way out. He said to the boys: I see a car, let’s go and see, we can come and get you, but they fell into the hands of ‘Yashma,’ and they haven’t seen him since,” the mother recounts.