Caucasus Heritage Watch has documented the destruction by Azerbaijan of the 1835 Halevor Bridge in Nagorno Karabakh, which spanned the Ishkhanaget River, 2km southwest of Mets Tagher.

“We have been concerned about this bridge since last summer. It was clearly visible in an Oct. 2021 satellite image,” CHW said on Twitter.

“But the bridge was no longer discernable by July 2022. In CHW’s monitoring report #4, we provisionally designated it as damaged. April 2023 imagery now shows that the bridge was destroyed during roadwork.”

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.