At least 108 Armenian monasteries, churches, and cemeteries in Nakhichevan have been demolished or blown up by the Azerbaijani government, according to the Caucasus Heritage Watch.
by Avedis Hadjian,
A yearlong investigation by a team of scholars affiliated with Cornell and Purdue universities has documented a pattern of deliberate obliteration of Armenian cultural heritage in Nakhichevan, a historically Armenian region that became part of Azerbaijan following the Sovietization of the republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan between 1920 and 1921. The new report by the Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) identified 108 medieval and early modern Armenian monasteries, churches, and cemeteries in Nakhichevan that were completely destroyed between 1997 and 2011 — an eradication described by the report’s authors as a “striking portrait of cultural erasure that, in its surgical precision, totality, and surreptitiousness, has few parallels.”
Of all the Armenian cultural heritage sites that CHW was able to locate and assess for this investigation, 98% have been completely wiped out. Proportionally, the degree of destruction is greater than the elimination of mosques by the Chinese government in the Xinjiang Uyghur region.
Nakhichevan is now an exclave at the intersection of Armenia, Iran, and Turkey, separated from Azerbaijan by the southern Armenian region of Syunik.
Azerbaijan’s 44-day war against Armenia and the Republic of Artsakh (the official name of the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Azerbaijan claims) in 2020, when roughly 5,000 Armenians died and Artsakh lost 75 percent of its territory to Azerbaijan, was followed by continued aggression against Armenia by the Azerbaijani regime of Heydar Aliyev — including an unprovoked attack against Armenia this week, on September 13 to 15, that left at least 135 Armenians dead — heightening concerns about the fate of Armenian heritage.
Entitled “Silent Erasure: A Satellite Investigation of the Destruction of Armenian Cultural Heritage in Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan,” the report was produced by Lori Khatchadourian, Adam T. Smith, Husik Ghulyan, and Ian Lindsay. It is the first time that conclusive evidence is presented about the systematic cultural erasure as part of “Azerbaijan’s domestic ethnic policies,” the authors of the document add.
“The program of silent erasure that we documented in Nakhchivan took place many years ago, but the outcome of the 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh gives it new urgency,” said Khatchadourian, associate professor of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University, in an interview with Hyperallergic. “As a result of that war, hundreds of Armenian monasteries, churches, and cemeteries were ceded to Azerbaijan, the very state that perpetrated systematic cultural erasure in Nakhchivan.”
There are reasons to “fear it could happen again,” she added.
The release of “Silent Erasure” could not have been more timely. Just this week, CHW released satellite imagery showing the destruction of a historic Armenian church in the village of Mokhrenes (Susanlyq, in the Azerbaijani nomenclature) in Nagorno-Karabakh between March and July of this year, Khatchadourian said. “This was the first major violation of the December 2021 International Court of Justice ruling that called on Azerbaijan to prevent and punish such acts.”
Last year, a report by Simon Maghakyan based on satellite imagery provided by CHW alerted about the destruction of churches by Azerbaijan in occupied Armenian territories. The report also acknowledged the groundbreaking work by Maghakyan and Sarah Pickman, who in 2019 identified “a pattern of total cultural erasure” in Nakhichevan.
Between 1998 and 2005, more than 800 khtachkars (stone crosses) were removed or destroyed with picks and maces by Azerbaijani soldiers in Old Jugha. In 2005, a Scottish specialist in Oriental Art History who visited Nakhichevan to investigate the condition of Armenian monuments was told by a local policeman that “there never were any Armenian churches anywhere in Nakhchivan.” It was towards the end of a short visit through a landscape of desolation, with very few Armenian ruins left: “There were no Armenians ever living here —so how could there have been churches here?,” the policeman added.
The population of Nakhichevan became majority Azerbaijani following massacres in the early 20th century. The 2,000 Armenians still left in Azerbaijan by 1989 fled following the beginning of Azerbaijani ethnic cleansing campaigns as the Soviet Union was unraveling.
“Silent Destruction” applied a combination of traditional cartography and modern technology to archeological forensics.
“Methodologically, the most significant issue in this kind of heritage forensics is geolocation,” said Smith, distinguished professor of Arts and Sciences at Cornell. “Simply finding sites whose very existence is denied is challenging.” Yet declassified American spy satellite images and archival Soviet topographic maps allowed CHW to determine the locations of sites. “A fascinating collaboration of former Cold War rivals,” he added.
Read more: https://hyperallergic.com/761723/cultural-armenian-heritage-sites-in-nakhichevan-destroyed-by-azerbaijan/