Harutyun’s son, Maranents Avag, went on with his business. He had a difficult destiny: in the spring of 1920 was wounded by the Turks in the Arpa canyon. To avoid captivity he had thrown himself off a cliff, and the bullet got him in the water. He was found downstream three days later near the Areni village and lived on to 1938, remaining a brave fighter in the collective memory of the village. That cliff overhanging the Arpa river was called Avag’s Rock.
Ovsanna, his wife, in spite of a ban by the authorities, was resolute to erect a khachkar on the grave of her beloved, which she commissioned in a workshop upstream by the river. It rained heavily the night before the delivery of the khachkar with three crosses, and the river washed the ornate tombstone away.
Ovsanna found it, quite by chance, 15 years later. In 1953 she went on a pilgrimage to the monastery of Tsakhats Qar; she got tired of walking and, by divine providence, sat on a stone by the river to take a rest. Scratching the sand and moss off the surface she discovered the long lost khachkar.