Three Apples: Nothing burns alone
California to Artsakh, a journey through fire, memory, and Armenian exile
Photos by Areg Balayan
A FIRE THAT NEVER GOES OUT
A single, dangerous ember finds its way onto a dry, shingled rooftop, silent, unnoticed. It glows for just a moment, then vanishes into the vast emptiness beyond. But embers do not truly disappear. They settle, sinking deep into the dry earth, into history, drifting like forgotten thoughts, but threatening to stain the history of every generation.
I am sitting on my balcony in West Los Angeles, watching the hills to the north. The city lies beneath a heavy sky from enormous loss, but it’s the hills I cannot stop staring at, the landscape that still bears the memory of something lost. The smoke is long gone from the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. The flames that tore through the Palisades have been subdued. Yet, in their wake, they leave a silence more profound than the fire itself.
Wildfires in California are the new normal, but the recent ones assaulted us with unfathomable death and destruction. The Palisades Fire swallowed 23,448 acres, turned thousands of homes into fleeting memories, and claimed 12 lives.
FLEEING INTO THE NIGHT
Somewhere in the foothills and valleys of the Caucasus mountain range, more than 120,000 people fled. Some had a moment to pack hurried suitcases, cramming essentials into cars with trembling hands. They grabbed their children, their photo albums, pieces of their lives they hoped might survive the unthinkable. Then, they fled. They ran, leaving behind everything they had built.
Others ran for their lives without even grabbing documents or toothbrushes. Some abandoned their cars when streets jammed, running on foot as flames raced toward them.
We know this story. We know the weight of stuffing a suitcase when forced to flee from civil wars, political chaos, and natural disasters like the 1988 Spitak Earthquake. I remember the night we packed our suitcases, the weight of uncertainty pressing down on us as Beirut burned.
FROM L.A. TO ARTSAKH, ECHOES OF BURNING HOMES
Not far away from the hills above Brentwood, which lie just miles from my balcony, the Eaton Fire tore through Altadena and Pasadena. 14,021 acres were erased. 17 more lives stolen. The toll beyond numbers: fathers, daughters, neighbors, lovers, friends, entire lifetimes burned away.
The fires are out, yes. But their ghosts remain.
I didn’t see the Eaton Fire from my balcony the way I saw the flames from Palisades. Instead, I saw it on two screens on my desk in the FOX 11 newsroom, hour after hour, night after night, as we worked around the clock for nearly three weeks. I wrote scripts for anchors. I edited video from the field. I wrote about human losses, homes reduced to embers, families who would never return.
Among the 16,255 structures lost, one stood out: Sahag-Mesrob Armenian Christian School. It had been a place where Armenian children once learned their language, their faith, their history. It had been reduced to ash. A different fire, but the same story. Another home, homeland. Another history erased.
And somewhere in the chaos of breaking news and final death counts, I thought of Artsakh. I thought of another fire, one that burned far away but felt intimately close.
THE FIRE THAT SWALLOWED ARTSAKH
That fire erased Artsakh, forcing 120,000 Armenians to flee their homes, their history, their identity. The loss reopened wounds long thought healed. Just as 1.5 million Armenians were lost in the Armenian Genocide, Artsakh became another chapter in our long cycle of displacement.
This was the land where the Armenian alphabet was first taught in the 5th century, where ancient monasteries stood for centuries. This land was on fire.
The people of Artsakh, who had fought for their right to self-determination, were forced to abandon everything.
Just a decade before, 48,000 perished in the liberation war before Artsakh’s fall. The 2023 fires burned while Russian peacekeepers watched.
THE SAME FIRE, THE SAME EXILE
Fires in California. Fires in Artsakh. Fires in Gaza. Fires in memory, history, exile. The names change, the faces change, but the story does not.
Since my first newsroom job at Horizon Armenian Television, I have scrolled through millions of images: a burnt baby held over flames in Sumgait; the civil war in Syria; the Houthis fighting in Yemen; the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan; North Koreans deployed in Russia’s war on Ukraine; the Taliban in Afghanistan; Islamist uprisings in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad; war between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front; and the criminal military junta in Myanmar.
Families wailed over shrouded bodies, pointing to destroyed homes. Their faces were grief-stricken, their eyes vacant. Their futures gone in flames. Behind them, what was once home was now a blackened husk.
A FIRE BURNING THROUGH HISTORY
I have seen these faces before. In black-and-white photographs from Sepastia and Erzurum, where the fire of genocide had already come decades before these flames. I see them in color photos of my parents in Beirut. People becoming refugees, displaced, still carrying the weight of their own losses. In grainy home video footage of Artsakh, where the fire had never fully left, the lingering ember would not go out. It was not allowed to go out by sociopaths, criminals, world governments, and even the United Nations.
The stories do not change. Only the years. Only the places. Yesterday, there was a house. Today, there is nothing. Yesterday, there were twin Armenian republics. Today, there is exile.
The green hills north of Brentwood burned, and I thought of Artsakh. The thick, ancient trees with roots tangled deep in the soil, their branches reaching skyward, until the moment the bombs came. The phosphorus fell into the Black Garden, Karabakh, Artsakh, a place where there was civilization dating back to antiquity.
The skies turned red, thick with blood, thick with fire. The air reeked of loss. The fire took everything.
A HOMELAND TURNED TO DUST
They call it Karabakh, the Black Garden. But before it was Karabakh, it was Artsakh, one of the 15 provinces of the ancient Kingdom of Armenia, a land with a people older than the names forced upon it.
1,700 square miles of Artsakh, gone. Hundreds of thousands of acres of historic Armenia, stolen. The phosphorus fell. The skies turned red, thick with blood, thick with fire.
The Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones descended like locusts, hunting, circling, dropping death. Men burned where they stood. Soldiers, whose bodies had been melted by white phosphorus. 18-year-olds, whose lungs were scarred from inhaling fire. The sons of Armenia with skin peeled off, their last moments spent breathing in their own burning flesh.
The hills of California glow red, and I see the villages of Artsakh, torched, abandoned, turned to dust in the wake of forced surrender. The Santa Ana winds howl through these canyons, and I hear the voices of my grandparents whispering stories of Sepastia and Erzurum. And I hear my father, my mother, my sisters, too.
We lost our home in Antelias, a suburb of Beirut and the seat of the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia. The civil war began. School shuttered. The power went out. Arab brothers turned against one another. Israel instigated and killed more of the people it had exiled during the Nakba, their catastrophe, now our collective catastrophe. The bombs fell. The city burned.
We packed what we could, handed the keys to a family who had lost their home, thinking we would return when the fighting was over.
THE WAR CAME, THE EXILE FOLLOWED
The war came. Arab brothers turned against one another. An extremely low-flying Israeli jet shook our homes, destroying the abundance that the “Paris of the Middle East” had once enjoyed. The place that united religions and sects in one parliament, a destination, gateway to the Arab world, the air and seaports to the Middle East were destroyed as the world watched.
We packed what we could, handed the keys to a family who had lost their home and rented ours, walked out the door thinking we would come back when the fighting was over. The fighting never stopped. The nation’s statehood collapsed. Business centers shifted to the Gulf states. Another fire. Another exile.
My family also walked away, drove to Syria, the land that Mark Antony gave as a wedding present to Cleopatra. Their story lived in history books while ours and many others became ghosts until this writer put them into words, saved as bits and bytes in the algorithm of the internet of all things.
A PRINTING PRESS SILENCED
And I think of my father’s publishing house on Mono Street Saht in the Al-Dabass (صحّة الدبّاس) neighborhood in Beirut, Lebanon.
The giant, basement-level presses once hummed, printing books in Western Armenian, books that would now never be read. Those books sat in stacks of boxes in warehouses after the start of the Civil War. They then were loaded into cargo ships and sat in our final family home in Fresno, waiting for hands that would never turn their pages.
The words, the western dialect of our language, the history, locked away in darkness, forgotten, collecting dust. Another kind of loss. Another kind of fire.
A HOMELAND BUILT AND LOST, AGAIN: DOING MY PART BEFORE THE FALL
I did what I could to build something new. I went to Artsakh to report on the roads, the schools, the homes we built from nothing. I stood in the dirt and felt something I had never felt before: a homeland not in exile, not theoretical, but real. I gave what I could. I have my voice, my words.
I went to Artsakh year after year. I reported on the roads we paved, the homes we built, the schools we opened. I walked the halls of the hospitals funded by donations, where the sick, who had been forgotten by the world, found healing.
I watched as doctors flown in from Yerevan and Glendale set up temporary clinics in remote villages where families who had never seen a physician received exams, medications, basic care.
I spoke to mothers waiting in lines stretching outside village halls, hoping for antibiotics, vitamins, a diagnosis, a cure. I saw the relief in their eyes when they were handed medicine, a bandage, a promise that they had not been abandoned.
ARMENIA FUND TELETHON, A GLOBAL MISSION
Every Thanksgiving, I stood next to Alina Dorian, Salpi Ghazarian, and Artak Herikian, then Tatevik Ekezian, Arsinee Khanjian, Mark Geragos, Maria Mehranian, and Araksya Karapetyan, under studio lights on Hollywood soundstages, speaking from the heart, asking the world to help.
I hosted group after group of schoolchildren who came with scripts explaining why they held bake sales. I heard the names of my parents’ friends, forgoing vacations, skipping home renovations, writing checks so families in Artsakh and Gyumri could have homes of their own.
With executive producer Mike Levin at the helm, I introduced Antranik “Anto” Baghdassarian, who matched donations with million-dollar checks that rebuilt whole communities. I talked to Hacop and Hilda Baghdassarian, who with their sons built community centers and schools, not for prestige, but out of love and duty.
THE ROAD TO TALISH, THE LAST DEFENDERS
We believed. We raised millions. We rebuilt. We thought we had outrun the fire that was to come. We built hospitals, cultural centers, highways that cut through mountains to connect our scattered villages.
Backstage, we shared Jhingyalov Hats, the traditional Armenian flatbread stuffed with a medley of 31 different greens, a taste of home amidst the studio’s sterile lights. I went along with one of the medical missions funded by the telethon, accompanying doctors from California’s Adventist Health Glendale, led by Dr. George Mutafyan.
In Stepanakert, the selfless doctors forgoing vacations performed brain and knee surgeries. In Tavush, they helped farmers, treated people for cholesterol and high blood pressure, and gave them medications villagers couldn’t afford.
In Noyemberyan, we met Grisha Khachigian, a man who worked with his hands until he couldn’t. “The pain was so bad that I couldn't do physical work," he told me. "I had a business and an orchard to run and worked in construction. But everything came to a grinding halt. I couldn’t move. And then the doctors came.” He spoke of them as if they were angels.
THE SOLDIER WHO NEVER LEFT
In 2019, I met Leova, a soldier who stayed in Talish after the 2016 war when everyone else had left. His village was abandoned, his home, his school, his neighbors gone, but he refused to leave. His neighbors didn’t leave by choice. They left because snipers took shots at them as they tried to tend to their farms, to live in peace. They left because the enemy wouldn’t let them plant, wouldn’t let them farm, wouldn’t let them walk outside without fear of being killed. But Leova stayed.
His village was abandoned, new houses built by the telethon left unoccupied, but he refused to leave. I remember the road he led us down, roads built by the generosity of Antranik Baghdassarian.
Leova took us deep into the forests above Talish, through tall grass and stone paths, leading to a 5th-century monastery and the castles of the Armenian Meliks, noble rulers who governed semi-autonomous regions from the 12th to 18th centuries.
There, among the ruins, he showed us the graves of his children. A 12-year-old daughter, Ani, who died because there was no way to get her to a hospital. A 3-month-old son, Hayk, lost to a medical mistake in a candlelit room during the war.
Leova did not cry. He did not blame. He just stood there, strong as the mountains, telling us, “I will never leave. I will never give up my home.”
As the Palisades, Eaton, Hurst, Kenneth, and Hughes fires burned, I wondered if Leova had stayed behind during the exodus, if he had fought to his death, or if he was in a prison cell in Baku right now, along with philanthropist Ruben Vardanyan, who donated a million dollars to the telethon.
Mr. Vardanyan, the last State Minister of Artsakh, is withering in jail after his arrest by Azerbaijan on September 27, 2023, as he attempted to cross back into Armenia. He has been absurdly charged with financing terrorism, creating and participating in illegal armed groups, and illegally crossing Azerbaijan's border. And I thought of Monte Melkonian, my Fresno neighbor's nephew, idealist, fighter, dreamer. He had left the safety and abundance of the West to fight and protect Armenians in Lebanon and then in Artsakh.
INVOLUNTARY SILENCE AND FORCED COMPLICITY
Then there was another kind of erasure. One not of bombs or phosphorus, but of silence.
I sat in many international newsrooms, watching, waiting, pitching stories about the blockade of Artsakh. Day after day, I asked, pushed, fought for coverage. But no one wanted it. They wouldn’t allow it. Not yet. Not until it was too late. Not until the people of Artsakh were already gone.
And when they were gone, the pathetic reporter from the scene said without explaining that the Armenians had left. Nothing about the threat of death and burning skin and inhaling one's lung tissue. He said the Armenians had left. It was called ethnic cleansing when Palestinians were forced out; but my people were billed as having the luxury of staying or going when the brutal enemy rolled into town.
I worked in newsrooms where we weren’t worth 15 seconds on the evening news. In one newsroom, a schedule coordinator told me his Turkish wife once warned him, “Watch out for Armenians. They're cheats, con artists, troublemakers.” And that is how he saw me: the Armenian hustler, the shyster, the charlatan. Not the man my parents raised, a disciplined, loyal, generous, honest man.
Some fires never die. They burn for centuries inside those whose ancestors were taught to hate in the old world, and brought those hatreds to the new.
And then, in October 2023, the war in Gaza began. I watched raw videotapes of burnt babies, toddlers shaking in pain, unable to make a sound because there were no painkillers left. Families shredded by bombs. Children undergoing amputations without anesthesia. Hospitals flattened. Homes turned to bone and dust.
I had written about genocide my entire career. I had written about Artsakh. I had written about how the world ignored our suffering. I had written about our people shouting “Never again” for 110 years. And there I was, watching it happen again. Everywhere.
In Artsakh. Gaza. Sudan. Myanmar. Ethiopia. Ukraine. It was happening everywhere, including to my own people.
THE LIE OF NEVER AGAIN
The world watched 1.5 million Armenians murdered in 1915 and said “never again.”
An Azeri coworker smirked as her government rewrote our history, insisting Armenians were Albanian Christians who stole music, heritage, food, land. She said Yerevan was Western Azerbaijan.
She had not read one page of real history, not even on Wiki, but knew the truth, so she’d spend her time not reading or asking but smearing her lips with extremely red, blood red lipstick. She was the holder of the truth in that organization. She was promoted, fired and rehired again.
The world watched the Holocaust and said “never again.” The world watched Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, and said “never again.”
But “never again” was a lie. Silence is another form of complicity.
And I wrote death tolls again as the numbers climbed past 47,000 Palestinians. Children buried under rubble. Hospitals bombed. Civilians massacred.
I wrote until my hands ached, until my rotator cuff tore, until breathing felt heavy.
I wrote about people I would never meet, in places I would never go, and I grieved for them as if they were my own. Because, in a way, they were.
THE DAY IT ALL FELL APART
And then, we lost it all. 120,000 people forced out of Artsakh.
They left keys in their doors, just like we once did. Others were too human and burned what they were leaving behind. The latter is what made headlines, not the 119,000 who didn't destroy what they had built.
The images of fleeing Armenians, cars lined up for miles on the lifeline highway we built, mirrored the scenes from my grandparents’ and parents’ exiles. The same fear. The same desperation. The same loss.
For decades, we poured our lives into building a homeland. We hosted telethons. We donated. We built highways, schools, hospitals, cultural centers, homes.
I traveled to Artsakh in 2019 to document these accomplishments for the annual report — the “Blue Book,” our testament. And now it was gone. Taken by a regime that used phosphorus and suicide drones to empty a land older than their own identity.
And on that same day, I lost my sister, Maral.
She fought like Artsakh fought. She fought for every breath. She fought until her lungs collapsed.
A lung transplant offered hope. But her immune system, like a wildfire consuming itself, turned against her. She died as Artsakh fell. Two collapses. One world ending.
A SONG FOR GRIEF, A TESTAMENT TO MEMORY
In my grief, I turned to Nune Yesayan’s “Hangist Togheq Indz Aysor.” Its longing for stillness matched the ember I saw on my rooftop, the fire in Artsakh, the loss of Maral.
This song, yearning for solitude and memory, mirrors the emotional core of this essay. The ember. The fires. The losses. Tragedies interwoven across time. Impermanence as inheritance. And yet, amidst the ashes, we rise... again and again.
A LEGACY OF LANGUAGE AND RESISTANCE
We honor the memories of those we lost, the homes abandoned, the dreams shattered. We are a people forged in fire; our resilience is tempered by generations of loss. From ashes, we lay the first stones of renewal.
Long before these tragedies, Mesrop Mashtots and Sahak Partev gave us language. They brought the Armenian alphabet to Artsakh, founding schools at Amaras Monastery, embedding identity into stone.
Their work protected us from erasure. And so, like Sahag-Mesrob Armenian School lost to the Eaton Fire, we rebuild. We rise. We restore what was taken.
THE FIRE ALWAYS COMES BACK
Some fires never truly go out. They return. They reset. They clear the land for something new. In spring, the hills will be green again. Shoots will rise from scorched soil. The wind will whisper in a language older than memory.
And we rebuild. We honor. We remember. We survive. Because the fire always comes back. And so do we.
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Paul Chaderjian is a journalist, author, and storyteller with over 35 years of experience in breaking news, content production, and newsroom management. He has worked in influential newsrooms, including American networks and international news channels, covering major global events. He also teaches journalism in the Cal State University system.
As a writer, Paul explores themes of identity, displacement, and the Armenian diaspora. His novel, ‘Letters to Barbra,’ delves into memory, trauma, and resilience, resonating with readers worldwide. Blending personal and universal narratives, he continues to craft compelling stories that inform, inspire, and connect audiences.
Paul may be reached via social media platforms @pchadNEWS
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