Azerbaijan removes cross from 7th century Armenian church

PanARMENIAN.Net - Azerbaijan has removed the cross from the dome of Vankasar Church, a 7th century Armenian church in Akna (Aghdam), which came under Baku’s control in the fall of 2020 – in the aftermath of the 44-day war unleashed by Azerbaijan against the people of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh).

A video posted by Azerbaijan’s official tourism website shows the ancient church from multiple angles with the cross removed.

Azerbaijan periodically desecrates historic Armenian monuments, labels them as “Albanian”, destroys monasteries and cemeteries, striving to achieve a total erasure of Armenian heritage sites.

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.