UNESCO has failed to comment on Azerbaijan's decision to "repair" a 12th century Armenian church in Nagorno-Karabakh, which Azeri President Ilham Aliyev described as "an Albanian temple" with "fake Armenian inscriptions."
Aliyev recently visited St. Astvatsatsin Armenian Church in the village of Tsakuri, Hadrut, and claimed that “Armenians wanted to Armenianize this church by leaving inscriptions in Armenian”.
He went so far as to say that the medieval church looks like “a barn and a garbage dump”, accusing Armenians of desecrating what he described as "an Albanian temple", and pledged to “restore” it.
PanARMENIAN.Net reached out to UNESCO for a comment, but the organization only said that their position remains as it was when they issued a statement in November 2020, proposing to send a technical mission to the areas concerned. The statement said back then that Director-General Audrey Azoulay reminded both countries the provisions of the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and its two Protocols, to which both Armenia and Azerbaijan are parties, and which are based on the States Parties’ conviction that “damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind”.
During the recent military hostilities, Azerbaijani forces launched two targeted attacks on the Holy Savior Ghazanchetsots Cathedral in Shushi. After taking control of the city, they destroyed the domes of Saint John the Baptist Church. Azerbaijan earlier "restored" a church by replacing its Armenian inscription with glass art.
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.
