Churches replaced, cemeteries destroyed: report highlights Azerbaijan’s “cultural erasure” in Nagorno-Karabakh [translated]

Automatic translation:

>In a report published this Thursday, the ECLJ details, based on satellite images, worrying disappearances or destructions of Armenian heritage monuments in this region, which came under Azeri control in September 2023.

>The thousand-year-old heritage of Nagorno-Karabakh is in danger. This is not only the fear of the 100,000 Armenians who fled their land in September 2023 after a military operation by Azerbaijan , but also the findings of the European Center for Law and Justice (ECLJ). In a report published this Thursday, which Le Figaro was able to consult, the international Christian NGO details the “cultural erasure” carried out by Baku in this region now under its control through destroyed churches, removed crosses and vandalized cemeteries. This “brazen and devastating policy (…) uses both destruction and revisionism to erase the heritage of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh,” warns the Strasbourg-based organization.

>The Nagorno-Karabakh region, populated almost continuously by Armenians since ancient times and disputed between Armenia and Azerbaijan since the fall of the Soviet Union, has around 500 cultural sites housing some 6,000 relics of Armenian heritage. In 2020, nearly 70% of the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh had already fallen under the yoke of Baku, at the end of a 44-day war. Since September 2023, when the entire territory came under Azeri control, Azerbaijan has consistently refused foreign observers access to cultural sites, despite numerous requests from Armenia and international institutions. Thus, it is through satellite images collected by researchers and organizations that the ECLJ was able to establish a precise inventory of destroyed churches, missing statues or vandalized cemeteries.

>Among them, the 18th-century Church of Saint Sargis in Hadrut, destroyed in 2022, had its land cleared to erect a new building. On April 4, 2024, the Church of Saint John the Baptist in Shushi, damaged by Azerbaijani bombs in 2020, was razed. Built in 1847, the “green chapel” was completely wiped off the map, according to the NGO Caucasus Heritage Watch, which relies in particular on images provided by Cornell University in the United States.

>Another form of erasure is the replacement of churches with Muslim places of worship. The Church of the Ascension in Berdzor, which the Azerbaijani “Public Organization for the Protection of Monuments” suggested be transformed into a mosque in 2022, was, no doubt for this purpose, demolished and its land cleared.

>Some churches have been specifically deprived of their Christian emblems. The Shushi Cathedral, according to images posted on Azerbaijani social media, had its angels removed from its portal, its domes and its cross. In the Surb Sargis church in a small village built in the 13th century, the Azerbaijani government, under the pretext of “renovation” work, destroyed religious symbols. Two historic polished stone slabs, decorated with Christian artwork and medieval Armenian inscriptions, were broken, ECLJ reports. According to local sources, the St. John the Mother of God Cathedral, built and consecrated in 2019, was also vandalized by Azerbaijanis. The cross that overlooked the Vankasar church in Tigranakert, dating from the 7th century, was also removed.

>For Patrick Donabédian, a medieval art historian specializing in the Caucasus, this Azeri policy is “the continuation by new means of the policy of the Ottoman Empire, in the 19th century, which consisted of removing any Armenian presence from the region . ” “This was manifested in turn by the extermination of the population (the Armenian genocide, editor’s note), by the destruction of their heritage, or by the reattribution of this heritage to others. The objective being, after having driven out the population, to prevent its return forever, and to show that the Armenians are foreigners to these regions without any right to these lands. ”

>In this perspective, cemeteries are also targeted. These places, which hold a special place in the Armenian identity very attached to ancestors, with their famous khachkars, tombstones of which the oldest date from the 9th century, were the subject of numerous acts of vandalism during Azeri military operations. After the departure of the last Armenians, the Ghuze T’agh cemetery near Aknaghbyur, dating from the 19th century, was completely demolished. Another located near Vazgenashen, dating from the 14th century, which housed several medieval khachkars, has been in an area of ​​intensive construction since 2023. According to satellite images, a significant part of the cemetery has already been destroyed, raising fears of replacement by modern infrastructure. In the Ghazanchetsots and Yerevan Gate cemeteries, built between the 18th and 19th centuries, bulldozers dumped debris onto tombstones and dug a road through the graves, mowing down historic tombstones.

>In light of this worrying series, the ECLJ says it fears for the integrity of the monasteries of Nagorno-Karabakh, which could be “stripped of their heritage” . “In particular, the fate of the Dadivank monastery (built between the 9th and 13th centuries), the Gandzasar monastery (built in the 13th century) and the Amaras monastery (built in the 4th century) has raised concerns among the international community ,” the NGO emphasizes.

>The ECLJ recalls that this erasure operation, which is part of the continuum of a balance of power between Armenia and Azerbaijan since the Soviet era, has been observed on both sides in the past. In 1993, when Armenia won the first Nagorno-Karabakh war, between
450,000 and 500,000 Azerbaijanis were forcibly expelled from the region, and many mosques and cultural sites destroyed. The NGO recalls, however, that “this cultural destruction was not as widespread or systematic as that which is taking place today in Nagorno-Karabakh . ”

>The NGO is all the more concerned about the ongoing cultural erasure since Baku has already proven itself in this area in Nakhichevan, another landlocked region located between Turkey, Iran and Armenia, under Azeri authority since the division of territories under the former USSR. Between 1997 and 2011, the Azerbaijani authorities destroyed nearly 98% of the medieval Armenian monasteries, churches and cemeteries in the historically Armenian region. “There was a systematic and total destruction of Armenian heritage. It was monstrous,” says historian Patrick Donabédian. Some 89 churches, 5,840 khachkars and more than 22,000 Armenian tombstones had disappeared. In the 1,500-year-old Julfa cemetery, almost all of the 10,000 Armenian khachkars were destroyed.

>The destruction is a grim sign of peace prospects as Azerbaijan and Armenia seek to reach a bilateral treaty . In Stepanakert, the capital of the former self-proclaimed republic of Artsakh, many monuments and statues commemorating Armenian history, including that of Charles Aznavour erected in front of the Paul Eluard Francophone Cultural Center, have been destroyed or removed. And videos of the Arstakhovsky parliament being bulldozed, which circulated on social media, remain in the minds of Armenians in exile as a gesture fraught with threats.