Karabakh committee: Azerbaijan planning to turn church into mosque

PanARMENIAN.Net - Azerbaijan intends to turn the Armenian Church of the Holy Resurrection in Berdzor into a mosque, the State Council for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Artsakh reports.

“Evidence of another manifestation of Azerbaijan’s policy of destroying the Armenian heritage at the state level has become available,” the Committee said in a Facebook post on Tuesday, January 30.

“Videos published on social networks have confirmed reasonable suspicions that arose back in 2022 about the likely transformation of the Church of the Holy Resurrection of Berdzor into a mosque.

“The church is now surrounded by barriers, and construction work appears to be or will be ongoing on the site. From a design published earlier it becomes clear that the church will be turned into a mosque with two minarets.”

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.