The Saint Katarine Church of Saint Petersburg offered a Requiem Service in memory of the victims of the pogroms that took place in Baku on January 13, 1990. After the Requiem Service, pastor of the Armenian community of the Northwestern Region, Friar Poghos Vardanyan addressed the gathered. “People can kill the body, but the soul never dies, and we as a nation are the descendants of those immortal souls. There should be no more pain, infidelity, murder and evil. We are the followers of God. We are Christians,” Father Poghos Vardanyan said, as reports YerkirMedia.

Members of the Armenian community laid flowers near the cross-stone placed in the churchyard. Members of the New Generation youth organization of the Church presented the history of the Armenian community of Baku at “Vernatun” Cultural Center. Among the speakers were pastor of the Armenian community in the Northwestern Region and Deputy General Secretary of the Council of the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly Haik Chilingaryan, who stressed that the Baku pogroms were the consequence of not learning the lessons from history, particularly the Armenian Genocide of 1915. The attendees also watched the documentary film “Typical Genocide: January 1990”.

Some of those who were saved from the raging hooligans by a miracle also settled in Saint Petersburg, and one of them is Adelina Mnatsakanova, who is the director of the “Tsiternak” international center for the recovery and social protection for refugee and displaced children of CIS countries. “I was the director of one of the best kindergartens in Baku, and I was also included in the list of the Armenians who were doomed to die. I remember the worst things on this day since many of my friends were killed. One of my friends and her family were killed. God saved me. When I reached Moscow and came off the plane, the first thing I asked myself was if I was alive or not,” the eyewitness said. Watch the video for details.