Famous opera singer Alena Grebenyuk has told why she did not leave for her homeland in Azerbaijan during the full-scale invasion.
The artist admitted in an interview for the TSN.ua project “Naodintsi” that at the age of 13 she was forced to leave her native Baku because of the armed conflict (1989). Then her family moved to Ukraine.
She recalled how her grandmother, a school teacher, didn’t want to leave her homeland, but one incident changed everything.
“One day, an unknown person grabbed her arm, and she had a wound there, a piece of shrapnel from World War II. And then she said: ‘We’re leaving.’ She wasn’t going because her relatives are buried in Nagorno-Karabakh, and her father’s house is there. And we came to Ukraine…There was shooting, cutting, and a lot of things going on,” Alena recalled.
Despite the fact that Baku is calmer now, the artist is not going to return to her hometown during a full-scale war. She made such a decision back in 1997 when she came to see her father’s home for the last time.