Azerbaijan plans to wipe off Armenian inscriptions from medieval church

PanARMENIAN.Net - Azerbaijan has threatened to wipe off Armenian inscriptions from a 12th century Christian church in the province of Hadrut, which has come under Baku's control as a result of the 44-day war in Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh).

President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan recently visited St. Astvatsatsin Armenian Church in the village of Tsakuri, Hadrut, and claimed that “Armenians wanted to Armenianize this church by leaving inscriptions in Armenian”.

He went so far as to say that the medieval church looks like “a barn and a garbage dump”, accusing Armenians of desecrating what he described as "an Albanian temple", and pledged to “restore” it.

During the recent military hostilities, Azerbaijani forces launched two targeted attacks on the Holy Savior Ghazanchetsots Cathedral in Shushi. After taking control of the city, they destroyed the domes of Saint John the Baptist Church. Azerbaijan earlier "restored" a church by replacing its Armenian inscription with glass art.

Concerns about the preservation of cultural sites in Nagorno-Karabakh are made all the more urgent by the Azerbaijani government’s history of systemically destroying indigenous Armenian heritage—acts of both warfare and historical revisionism. The Azerbaijani government has secretly destroyed a striking number of cultural and religious artifacts in the late 20th century. Within Nakhichevan alone, a historically Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani forces destroyed at least 89 medieval churches, 5,840 khachkars (Armenian cross stones) and 22,000 historical tombstones between 1997 and 2006.