Garen Garibyan does not give up. Although he has been forced to leave Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) twice, his opera studio project for children will continue to grow and thrive. His story is a demonstration of courage, and an inspiration.
Singer, actor, and director, Garibyan received his master’s degree at Tallinn Conservatory and lived and worked for many years in the United States. In 1992, thanks to sponsors from all over the world, he founded the Shushi Music School in Artsakh; his Shushi Music School Society, also founded in 1992, thrived until the Azerbaijani aggression in 2020 shut it down. At that time, he, his teaching staff, and students fled to Stepanakert, leaving their homes and the music school with all its instruments and teaching materials behind. There, in Stepanakert, he reopened his school in 2022, only to flee again. In September 2023, they experienced the traumatic expulsion a second time, leaving music school and homeland with only necessary belongings, this time for the Republic of Armenia.
Garibyan and his wife found refuge in Nor Hachn, 25 kilometers north of Yerevan. He was desperate. “After the terrible war and expulsion,” he recalls, “I walked the streets in Yerevan like a madman for a whole month.” Then, he found hope again. In 2022, he had been able to start over again in Stepanakert with the help of contributions coming from Germany. A call for funds had gone out from the Association for the Promotion of an Ecumenical Memorial to Genocide Victims in the Ottoman Empire (FÖGG), co-founded by human rights proponent Tessa Hofmann. The donations covered costs for meals for students, about $150 a day for 100 children. Garibyan appealed to all friends and acquaintances to help meet these costs, explaining, “We have pupils whose fathers never returned from the front, another with three children in the family who study at our school; I know you understand what is at stake here.”
Following their second expulsion in 2023, again it was through Hofmann and her associates in Germany that enough funds were raised to allow him to start a third time. Garibyan wrote to potential donors: “We continue our odyssey, I opened an opera studio at a local music school, gathered the children, and have already started work on a children’s opera, which I could not finish at home in Artsakh. I have already gathered 35 children (from 8 to 14 years old), half of them from Artsakh, many from our school.” In a brief C.V., he noted he had graduated in Europe from the University of Tartu, Estonia, (medical psychology), Tartu Art College, and the Tallinn Conservatory vocal class (baritone). “I have worked in many opera houses around the world and many chamber music concerts, in Europe and in America,” he wrote, then concluded, “For 30 years I had been building our school in Artsakh, and then I had to leave our school to the Azerbaijanis.”
The crowd-fundraising effort in Germany generated enough funds to start up the project again. After learning of the success, he thanked his benefactors, writing, “Now, I have finally found myself, and this time, thanks to your outstretched helping hand, I have come to life again.”
A Struggle between Good and Evil
