Azerbaijanis demolish Armenian cemetery in Karabakh

PanARMENIAN.Net - An Armenian cemetery in the village if Mets Tagher in the Hadrut region of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) has been destroyed by Azerbaijanis, who came to control the area and the neighboring village of Khtsaberd after the November 9 agreement, Caucasus Heritage Watch reports.

Caucasus Heritage Watch monitors and documents endangered and damaged cultural heritage using high-resolution satellite imagery.

The cemetery was founded in the early 19th c. and was in use when Armenians evacuated the village in 2020. Satellite imagery shows its complete destruction and signs of bulldozer scars.

In the same village, Caucasus Heritage Watch said, the Surb Amenaprkitch church, founded 1846, appears to be threatened by construction. As of April 8, the area just east of the church was bulldozed, and trucks were parked in the clearing.

In the past 48 hours alone it was reported that Azerbaijan has removed the domes of the iconic Ghazanchetsots Cathedral in the Nagorno-Karabakh city of Shushi, and desecrated the cemetery of the Nagorno-Karabakh village of Taghavard. Both settlements came under the control of Baku during the war in fall 2020.

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.