Report by Caucasus Heritage Watch Shows Near Total Destruction of Armenian Heritage in Nakhichevan

The covert, state-sponsored program of cultural erasure that we have documented in Nakhichevan reaffirms the importance of an immediate and resolute international response if the medieval and early modern Armenian monuments of Nagorno-Karabakh are to be spared the same sad and shocking fate as their counterparts in Nakhichevan.

Meanwhile, CHW’s satellite-monitoring of the region will continue, and data will be made available through an  interactive dashboard  and a series of regular  reports  that can be accessed from our website. Our next Special Report will document the fate of Azerbaijani and Islamic cultural heritage sites in territories that had been under ethnic-Armenian administration for 30 years; our preliminary assessments for that work can be found in the Ongoing Historic Research section of our report, in both the  abridged  and  full  versions.

In at least eight instances, churches and monasteries that were destroyed had been included in the April 27, 1988 monuments list of the Azerbaijan S.S.R. (Resolution 145). Two of these sites (#2853, 2854 in the figure at right) were listed as “Albanian temples”, referring to an  obscure historical group  from which, according to official Azerbaijani historiography, modern Azerbaijanis descend. Since the 1960s, this distorted history has been deployed in order to appropriate Armenian monasteries and churches to a fictional origin myth. The destruction of these two such “Albanian” temples (in fact, Armenian churches, numbered N.431 and N.446 in our database), reveals the hollowness of the appropriation. In Nakhichevan, even the government of Azerbaijan appears unconvinced by the “Albanization” of Armenian sites, and hence they too had to be destroyed.

The specific mechanisms for the implementation of this policy of erasure remain uncertain. But information leaked to Argam Ayvazyan, a prominent historian of Nakhichevan, provides the broad contours of how the campaign of destruction was carried out. In an Armenian-language pamphlet called Unpublished Interview (2009: 13), Ayvazyan notes that the government of Azerbaijan created 7-8 groups of 20-25 individuals “who had at their disposal the ammunition necessary to blow up monasteries and churches, and the machinery to eliminate the destroyed traces of the monuments….”

Timing of the Destruction

Armenian heritage in Nakhichevan had already been reduced during the Soviet era, when the region was an autonomous republic within the Azerbaijan S.S.R. But it was not the target of a systematic program of total cultural erasure until 1997, six years after Azerbaijan gained its independence from the Soviet Union. In 1989, just  under 2000 Armenians remained  in Nakhichevan. The First Nagorno-Karabakh War and the attendant surge in anti-Armenian sentiment in Azerbaijan ensured that, by the early 1990s, no Armenians remained in the region as potential witnesses to heritage destruction.

CHW’s satellite analysis indicates that Azerbaijan’s systematic program of Armenian heritage erasure began 2-3 years prior to our earliest imagery from 2000, putting the start date sometime in 1997. This accords closely with evidence from a telegram sent by the Azerbaijani novelist and parliamentarian Akram Aylisli to then President Heydar Aliyev on June 10, 1997. In it, Aylisli reports that “recently it became known to me that in my native village of Aylis [Arm. Agulis] large-scale work is underway [by the military] for the eradication of Armenian churches and cemeteries….” Aylisli urged Aliyev to undertake “urgent measures” to end “this evil vandalism”  (Maghakyan and Pickman 2019 ;  Maghakyan 2021 ). A start date for the program of erasure in 1997 also accords with an encounter Argam Ayvazyan had with a childhood acquaintance from Nakhichevan in an Istanbul bus station in 1998 or 1999 during which he was informed that the destruction of Armenian monuments had recently commenced (personal communication, 2022).

The first direct observation of heritage destruction in Nakhichevan to have leaked out to global audiences came in 1998, when “eye-witnesses from the Iranian border zone” across the Araxes river from the Medieval Armenian  Cemetery of Old Jugha (Julfa) (N.307)  “observed tombstones being excavated by a crane and loaded onto railroad wagons on the cemetery grounds across the river Araxes. The ripped-up ground was then made even again by bulldozers. This destruction lasted for three weeks and about 800 Khatchkars [cross stones] were taken away” ( ICOMOS 2002-03 ).

Taken together, the evidence indicates that 108 Armenian heritage sites were all destroyed in, at most, a 14-year period from 1997-2011. In each case, the result was not simply damage to sites but total erasure. The timeline of destruction and its totality clearly indicate a systematic, coordinated state-sponsored campaign to eradicate all traces of Armenian communal and religious presence from Nakhichevan, and thus Armenians themselves from the history of the region. The satellite evidence thus corroborates the core finding of Maghakyan and Pickman’s  2019 investigation . Sustained denial by Azerbaijani officials that Armenians ever lived in the region represents the culmination of this program of complete cultural erasure. The voluminous evidence of Armenian monuments – present and then destroyed – provided in CHW’s StoryMaps both puts the lie to Azerbaijan’s historical revisionism and exposes the violence of its program of silent erasure.