Monday, September 19, 2022

Report shows near-total erasure of about 108 Armenian heritage sites in Azerbaijan between 1990-2011

Crimes against humanity! Will those responsible be held accountable?

"A new report from the Cornell-led Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) has compiled decades of high-resolution satellite imagery to document the complete destruction of Armenian cultural heritage in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan beginning in the late 1990s. ...
According to CHW’s report on Nakhchivan, of the 110 medieval and early modern Armenian monasteries, churches and cemeteries that CHW identified from archival sources, 108 were destroyed between 1997 and 2011 in what the authors describe as “a systematic, state-sponsored program of cultural erasure.” ...
Many of the cultural sites were significant architectural monuments. The Monastery of St. Tovma in the village of Agulis, an important ecclesiastical center of medieval Armenia, featured exquisite frescoes and inscriptions. St. Nshan Monastery of Bist was a well-known medieval cultural center with a scriptorium that produced illuminated manuscripts now held in museums. ...
“Since these cultural heritage monuments are no longer on the landscape, and since the government of Azerbaijan denies that they ever existed in the first place, it required painstaking forensic work just to find their precise geographic coordinates,” ..."

Report shows near-total erasure of Armenian heritage sites | Cornell Chronicle

No comments: