By Heydar Isayev, Ani Mejlumyan
Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Culture has responded to controversy resulting from its earlier announcement that it intended to erase Armenian inscriptions from churches located in territories the country reclaimed as a result of the 2020 war against Armenia.
On February 7, the ministry published a statement addressing what it called “reports circulated by some biased foreign mass media outlets over the past few days.” It emphasized that “Azerbaijan has always been respectful of its historical and cultural heritage, regardless of religious and ethnic origin.”
Four days earlier, Minister of Culture Anar Karimov told a press briefing that it would be forming a working group tasked with removing “the fictitious traces written by Armenians on Albanian religious temples.”
That referred to a theory, which has become prominent in Azerbaijan but is dismissed by actual historians, that Armenian inscriptions in churches on Azerbaijani territory were later additions to churches built under Caucasian Albania, an ancient Christian kingdom that ruled the territory that is today Azerbaijan.
The new statement reaffirmed that “a working group has been set up to study this heritage” and that “[s]hould any falsifications be identified, they will be documented with the participation of international experts and presented to the international community.” But it did not mention removing any Armenian traces, as Karimov’s earlier announcement did.
