Azerbaijan’s Culture Minister Anar Kerimov said on February 3 that he has set up a working group tasked with removing “false” Armenian traces from churches which he claimed had been built by Caucasian Albania, an ancient kingdom that covered much of modern-day Azerbaijan’s territory.
Armenia strongly condemned the development on Tuesday, saying that it is part of Baku’s attempts to “illegally appropriate” Armenian cultural and religious heritage.
“It once again demonstrates the fact that the cases of vandalism and destruction of Armenian historical, cultural and religious heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh during the 44-day war and the following period are deliberate and pre-planned, and are part of a policy of depriving Nagorno-Karabakh of its indigenous Armenian population,” said Vahan Hunanian, the Armenian Foreign Ministry spokesman.
Hunanian accused Azerbaijan of defying the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which ordered it last December to “prevent and punish acts of vandalism and desecration affecting Armenian cultural heritage.” He also called for an “immediate intervention” by UNESCO, another United Nations body.
The head of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Nadine Maenza, echoed the Armenian concerns on the federal government agency’s Twitter page.
“We are deeply concerned by Azerbaijan's plans to remove Armenian Apostolic inscriptions from churches,” she said. “We urge the government to preserve and protect places of worship and other religious and cultural sites.”
Over the past year Armenian officials have accused the Azerbaijani authorities of systematically desecrating or destroying Armenian monuments in Karabakh. According to them, at least two churches have been torn down since a Russian-brokered ceasefire stopped the six-week war in November 2020.
They have also accused Baku of vandalizing Karabakh’s Holy Savior Cathedral located in the Azerbaijani-controlled town of Shushi (Shusha). The 19th century Armenian church was stripped of its conical domes and covered in scaffolding a year ago. Azerbaijani officials said it will undergo a major reconstruction.
The Shushi cathedral was twice hit by long-range Azerbaijani missiles during the war.
There are also lingering concerns about the fate of the medieval Dadivank monastery located in the Kelbajar district just west of Karabakh.
Although the district was handed over to Azerbaijan shortly after the 2020 truce, Russian peacekeeping forces set up a permanent post at Dadivank to protect Armenian clergymen remaining there. For almost a year, the Azerbaijani side has not allowed the peacekeepers also escort Karabakh Armenian worshippers to the monastery for religious ceremonies.
Baku claims that Dadivank and just about every other church in the region is “Albanian.” Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev underlined this decades-long policy in March 2021 when he visited a medieval Armenian church in Karabakh’s southern Hadrut district captured by the Azerbaijani army.
“All these inscriptions are fake, they were added later,” Aliyev claimed there.
Bishop Vrtanes Abrahamian, the head of the Artsakh (Karabakh) Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church, complained on Tuesday that for all their public statements the Armenian authorities remain “passive” in the face of what he too sees as Azerbaijani efforts to erase Armenian traces.
“They only talk and don’t act,” Abrahamian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.