Azerbaijan announces plans to erase Armenian traces from churches
Sunday, February 6, 2022 – ARTSAKH – armenews.com 2022:
The culture minister said a task force will be set up to identify what he called the “fake Armenian” of the churches, putting into practice a pseudo-scientific theory that denies the Armenian origin of the churches.
The Azerbaijani government has announced plans to erase Armenian inscriptions from religious sites in the territory it reclaimed in the 2020 war with Armenia.
He justified this decision by arguing that the churches were in fact originally the legacy of Caucasian Albania, an ancient kingdom once located in present-day Azerbaijan. The theory, which is not supported by mainstream historians, has long been propagated by Azerbaijani nationalist historians and has been adopted by the current government in Baku.
Culture Minister Anar Karimov said at a press briefing on February 3 that a working group has been created that will be tasked with removing “fictitious traces written by Armenians on Albanian religious temples.”
“We will inspect these places with the members of the task force, and after the inspection we will consider our next steps,” Karimov said. Although he did not identify who will be part of the task force, the minister said the group will be made up of “local and international experts”.
The Albanian theory was first developed in the 1950s by prominent Azerbaijani historian Ziya Buniyatov, who claimed that Armenian inscriptions in churches on Azerbaijani territory were later additions to Albanian churches. According to this theory, they were only “Armenianized” as a result of large-scale Armenian emigration to the region after Russia took control of the territory from Azerbaijan in the early 19th century.
The theory gained momentum after the 2020 war, when Azerbaijan regained control of a territory that contained several important medieval Armenian churches.
In March 2021, during a trip to Hadrut, President Ilham Aliyev, together with his wife and daughter, visited a 12th-century Armenian Church of the Holy Mother of God, which was in ruins. “The Armenians wanted to Armenianize this church and wrote Armenian inscriptions there, but they failed. If it was an Armenian church, would they leave it in such a state? It looks like it was a dump,” Aliyev told the church. “All these inscriptions are false – they were written later. »
The day after the signing of the ceasefire ending the 2020 war, Karimov tweeted about the medieval Armenian monastery Dadivank in the Azerbaijani district of Kelbajar, calling it by the Azerbaijani name Khudavang and describing it as “the ‘one of the best testimonies of the ancient Caucasian Albanian civilization’. “In May 2021, a 19th-century church in the town of Shusha that had been damaged during the war began undergoing reconstruction, in what Baku described as its ‘original’ form.
Meanwhile, Azerbaijan has also promised to restore Azerbaijani monuments in the territory that had been neglected or vandalized during the years of Armenian occupation. In one case, Aliyev promised to restore a 19th-century mosque that Armenians had presented as Persian rather than Azerbaijani.
But the task force’s announcement is the first concrete step the government has taken in openly promising to erase Armenian traces from churches now under its control.
“Usually, even when they restore or renovate historical sites, we only become aware of what they have done afterwards,” Javid Agha, a social media commentator who has researched the site extensively, told Eurasianet. Albanian heritage in Azerbaijan.
Agha drew a comparison with Julfa, in Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan, where thousands of Armenian “khachkar” stone crosses were destroyed in 2005.
The ongoing threats to Armenian cultural sites have drawn the attention of the international community. Shortly after the war, Aliyev promised Russian President Vladimir Putin that he would protect Christian sites in the newly recaptured territories. UNESCO issued a statement warning Armenia and Azerbaijan that “damage to cultural property belonging to any people means damage to the cultural heritage of all humanity.” However, efforts by UNESCO to send a mission to Karabakh to examine cultural heritage sites have long stalled.
In December, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Azerbaijan must “take all necessary measures to prevent and punish acts of vandalism and desecration affecting Armenian cultural heritage, including, but not limited to , churches and other places of worship, monuments, landmarks, cemeteries and artifacts.
“If this is true, they are flagrantly violating the [ICJ] order,” Sheila Paylan, legal counsel in Armenia for the ICJ case, told Eurasianet. “For the future of this case, it certainly does not help Azerbaijan’s position that they fully comply with the obligation to prevent desecration. This constitutes an active measure to falsify and destroy Armenian cultural heritage.
Armenian officials did not immediately react to the Azerbaijani announcement. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Vahan Hunanyan told Eurasianet that they have no comment on this specific issue so far, but have repeatedly stressed the importance of preserving heritage. Armenian culture.
With additional reporting by Ani Mejlumyan.
Heydar Isayev is a journalist from Baku.
It should be noted that Azerbaijan was elected a member of the UNESCO Committee on December 1, 2021 for four years. In November 2020, Audrey Azoulay, Director General of Unesco, had “reaffirmed the universal dimension of cultural heritage, a witness to history and inseparable from the identity of peoples, which the international community has a duty to protect”. .
She notably mentioned the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, which allows the UNESCO Secretariat to send such a mission. However, this never happened, it would be a first. Since the beginning of the clashes, Unesco has received, from the two parties in conflict, a flood of information on alleged violations affecting the heritage and cultural property of Nagorno Karabakh: destruction, vandalism…
by Jean Eckian on Sunday, February 6, 2022
© armenews.com 2022
Translated into English by Lousavor Avedis
