Lika Zakaryan is the author of 44 Days: Diary of an Invisible War, an eloquent and poignant diary of the 2020 Artsakh War. It speaks to the soul of humanity and conveys exactly what happened to the Armenians of Artsakh.
Lika (Anzhelika) Zakaryan was born in Stepanakert, Artsakh. She graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science from Artsakh State University. She has specialized in conflict management and methods of peacebuilding.
Zakaryan worked at a rehabilitation center as a social worker as well as in the Artsakh Ministry of Culture, Youth and Tourism as a project and social media manager. From 2018-2019 she worked at the Montessori school in Würzburg, Germany, as a coach in conflicts and peacebuilding. During that time, she received a year of training at the local Jubi Grenzenlos organization on conflict transformation and peacebuilding. She returned to Artsakh, took courses in civic journalism courses and began working for CivilNet media outlet. She also worked for the YMCA Europe as a communications specialist from 2021-2023.
During the 44-day war in Artsakh, Zakaryan started to write and post her diary online while living through the shelling in bunkers. The diary was widely read and loved by people worldwide and remains a definitive chronicle of those 44 days. The following year, Zakaryan, with the support of Creative Armenia NGO, published the diary as a book — 44 Days: Diary from an Invisible War. She is also a co-writer of the documentary on the war, Invisible Republic.
“The film is directed by Garin Hovannisian. He was reading the diaries during the war and came to Artsakh to film the war through the vision of my diaries, which became the film later. I didn’t plan to write a book. I was just sharing my feelings about each day of the war on social media. In the end, we decided to make it a book with the support of Creative Armenia NGO,” Zakaryan said.
The film has been screened at film festivals in Europe and the United States and shown at the U.S. Congress and European Parliament.
Zakaryan is working on a new book highlighting the stories of the people of Artsakh. She feels the need to work on this book to document the human side of what happened to the Artsakh Armenians. She currently works as a freelance journalist and shares the human stories of Artsakh in the Artsakh dialect in her podcast series “Muklimandil.”
Zakaryan would like the world to know the following: “Artsakh is a paradise on earth, and the people of Artsakh faced injustice, and it was ethnically cleansed. I would like people to see that it isn’t just a territory. It is a homeland for us.”
Talar Keoseyan
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Personally I agree with the author. I have had the opportunity to visit Artsakh. Artsakh was populated by Armenian people. The Armenian Apostolic religion was obvious as was all aspects of Armenian culture.
The real tragedy seems to be that the current Prime Minister of Armenia did not appear to believe Artsakh was a part of Armenia. He threw Artsakh and the Armenians living therein “under the bus” when he declared the area to belong to Azerbaijan and turned it over to Azerbaijan p.