Hyperallergic

Why Armenian Cultural Heritage Threatens Azerbaijan’s Claims to
Nagorno-Karabakh

[Azerbaijan continues to erase Armenian history in favor of a
discredited theory that the region’s Christian sites were made by a
now-extinct group called Caucasian Albanians.]

by Yelena Ambartsumian

Around 3am on September 27, my phone buzzed with messages that
Azerbaijan had launched an aerial assault on Nagorno-Karabakh — the
landlocked, mountainous enclave in the south Caucasus populated and
controlled by 150,000 ethnic Armenians but claimed by neighboring
Azerbaijan. Nagorno-Karabakh (historically called “Artsakh” in
Armenian) is home to one of the world’s oldest surviving indigenous
Christian populations, though their history predates Christianity by
centuries. Its rugged and mountainous landscape served as a refuge for
early Christians fleeing persecution in the second to fourth centuries
CE and later as a buttress against Islamization, which swept through
the Caucuses and converted most of the inhabitants in the low-lying
plains to Karabakh’s east. Today, its cultural topography, dotted by
fortresses overlooking gorges, intricately carved cross-stone
monuments with ancient eternity symbols, and centuries-old monasteries
with fortified walls, serves as a living witness to the enduring
presence of the Armenians.

On that Sunday morning, both Nagorno-Karabakh’s people and its
cultural heritage were under attack. While the semi-frozen conflict
has seen numerous skirmishes and ceasefire violations over the last
two decades, this time felt different. And, indeed, it was. My loved
ones were immediately deployed, in their standing militias, to defend
their villages, while their families hid in bunkers, makeshift bomb
shelters, and dense forests. But, unlike the Nagorno-Karabakh War in
the early 1990s that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union — which
was preceded by the anti-Armenian pogroms in Baku, Azerbaijan that
caused my family and me to become refugees — my fellow Armenians were
defending themselves not only from Azerbaijani soldiers less familiar
with the area’s mountainous terrain, but from Israeli and Turkish
drones that easily reached them from overhead, as well as Islamist
mercenaries from northern Syria, all with the logistical and tactical
support of Azerbaijan’s ethnic and military ally Turkey.

On October 7, I fell asleep flipping through my photos of
Nagorno-Karabakh. That night, I imagined myself visiting the Holy
Savior Cathedral (Ghazanchetsots Cathedral) in Shushi and once again
stepping inside the small, circular room hidden behind the altar where
you can pray and hear your voice 360 degrees around your body. I
closed my eyes and traced a path from the cathedral to the Silk Road,
which runs through Shushi and on which many of my
great-great-grandfathers had traveled with their caravans to Iran and
beyond. We were only one week into the war, but I was yearning for
peace and already imagining how I could assist in Nagorno-Karabakh’s
rebuilding.

[Photo: Gtichavank’s altar (2015), covered in matchboxes and thick
layers of candle wax, indicated that local Armenian Christians
continued to visit the cathedral for devotional purposes despite that
it had not been maintained during the Soviet period.]

Looking back now, these thoughts were a fantastical defense-mechanism.
In reality, I was keenly aware that exactly 100 years ago, in 1920,
Azerbaijanis (or rather, Caucasian Tatars as they were then still
commonly called at the time) with the help of their ethnic allies the
Ottoman Turks — fresh from their genocide of 1.5 million Armenians —
killed every last Armenian in Shushi, burned 7,000 Armenian homes and
businesses, and destroyed the city’s Armenian churches. At the time,
Artsakh’s population was over 90% Armenian, but territorial control of
the region was in flux. Due to the Caucasian Tatars’ claims on the
Armenian homeland, including Artsakh, Zangezur, and Nakhichevan, the
League of Nations rejected in December 1920 the recently formed
Azerbaijan Democratic Republic’s request for statehood, finding that
it was impossible to determine the exact limits of territory over
which it exercised authority.

Indeed, in the Russian Revolution’s aftermath, several nation-states
emerged in Transcaucasia and attempted to define their borders, often
resulting in interethnic violence. Amidst the chaos of this bloody
nation building, the British, Germans, and Turks each sought to
control the resource-laden city of Baku (present-day Azerbaijan) and
its oil reserves. (At that point, my family was already living in Baku
and working in positions in the oil and natural gas industry, as were
many other Armenians from Artsakh.) In 1920, the Bolsheviks solidified
their grip on Baku, which was critical for the Soviet Union’s energy
needs. With the help of certain ethnic Armenian factions, the
Bolsheviks overthrew the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and replaced
it with the newly formed Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic
(“SSR”). Soon after, apparently under pressure from Turkey and to
placate the Azerbaijan SSR, Joseph Stalin carved out Artsakh from its
ancestral home in Armenia and plopped it within the borders of the
recently created and oil-rich Azerbaijan SSR. As a half-hearted
consolation to the Armenians and perhaps out of recognition that
Artsakh had maintained a multiethnic but Armenian majority population
for over two-thousand years, the territory became an autonomous,
largely self-administered oblast (the Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous
Oblast), with Shushi as its administrative center.

[Photo: After reclaiming Ghazanchetsots Cathedral from
Azerbaijani-occupation during the 1990s Nagorno-Karabakh War, the
Armenians chose not to repair certain elements of the cathedral’s
destruction to serve as a reminder for future generations — including
this example whereby Jesus’s face and most of his body have been
hammered off, presumably by Azerbaijani iconoclasts (2015).]

After dreaming about my return to Shushi, the next day, October 8, I
awoke to photos of a shelled Ghazanchetsots Cathedral. Azerbaijan had
struck Shushi’s historic cathedral not once, but twice. The second
strike, reportedly from a missile-laden drone, injured three foreign
journalists who had come to the scene to document the first attack.
Having been to Shushi several times, I understood that this strike
could not have been an accident. The only structure near
Ghazanchetsots Cathedral is a Soviet-era apartment building. There
were no military targets. And we soon learned that mothers had been
taking cover in the cathedral’s basement with their children, to hide
from Azerbaijan’s aerial bombardment and drone attacks. Azerbaijan
denied that it had targeted the cathedral and called such accusations
both “fake news” and “black propaganda” — as is common for its
autocratic, totalitarian regime when questioned about its numerous war
crimes and human rights violations. Meanwhile, on October 9, 2020, I
watched a Russian-Azerbaijani journalist on a Russian news program,
Evening with Vladimir Soloviev, posture that the attack, if it did
happen, was justified because Armenian soldiers were using
Ghazanchetsots Cathedral for prayer and Azerbaijan must snuff out
these Armenian “terrorists” in whatever “toilet” they can be found.
While soldiers praying in a church does not justify converting a
religious or cultural site into a military objective under the
relevant international laws, it is a telling portrayal of how today’s
despotic Azerbaijan teaches Azerbaijanis to view Armenians and
Armenian cultural and religious heritage.

[Photo: The view from Ghazanchetsots Cathedral (2010) (photograph
courtesy the author)]

The war continued for over a month. Nearly each day, I received
distressing news from my friends on the ground about Azerbaijani
forces’ apparent use of cluster munitions in residential areas,
beheadings and mutilations of prisoners of war and captured civilians,
and incendiary munitions raining down on Nagorno-Karabakh’s dense
forests outside of my maternal line’s village of Nngi, accompanied by
video documentation on social media channels — only for most news
outlets and numerous inter- and non-governmental organizations to call
on “both sides” to end hostilities, or worse, repeat the Azerbaijani
regime’s unsubstantiated and illogical accusations (supported and
repeated by Turkish officials and media) that it was ethnic Armenians
who were behind these crimes and “provocations.”

By November 10, 2020, Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed to a
Russian-brokered ceasefire (the “Trilateral Agreement”), which ceded
over two-thirds of Nagorno-Karabakh, including Shushi, to Azerbaijan
and welcomed a revocable Russian peacekeeping presence into the
region. The parallels between today’s conflict and what happened one
hundred years ago could not be any more apparent. The single new
dimension, however, was the power of social media, which is both how
we received our information about what was happening on the ground and
how Azerbaijan’s regime disseminated the disinformation it wanted the
international community to believe.

Immediately after the ceasefire, Azerbaijani politicians took to
Twitter (the social media platform of their choice) to declare victory
in “liberating” Nagorno-Karabakh (never mind that Nagorno-Karabakh had
never been ruled by a post-Soviet independent Azerbaijan) and to
espouse the unsubstantiated theory that Nagorno-Karabakh’s
centuries-old religious sites are not Armenian at all but rather
Caucasian Albanian (a confederation of tribes dating from the second
century BCE and later a kingdom in the Caucasus that they regard as
proto-Azerbaijani and the original inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh, a
claim unsupported by any serious scholarship). This revisionist
Azerbaijani social media activity was met with a simultaneous plea to
preserve Armenian cultural heritage, by institutions such as the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as an open letter from numerous
scholars, and even a warning to Azerbaijan from President Vladimir
Putin himself stating that Christian sites must be protected.

I had come across Azerbaijan’s Caucasian Albanian claim several years
ago, when researching what protections, if any, existed under
international law for Armenian cultural heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh
under Azerbaijan’s control. This was particularly important given that
the Armenian Republic of Artsakh in which the cultural heritage
resided (until the recent Trilateral Agreement) is a republic
unrecognized by any other country, which poses a problem for
international protection of such cultural heritage as most
intergovernmental organizations are built around the principle of
sovereign equality of states instead of the rule of law. At the time,
I believed that if the quarter century of negotiations under the
auspices of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
(OSCE) Minsk Group failed and war broke out anew, Azerbaijan would
once again intentionally target Armenian cultural and religious sites
as they did in the 1990s Nagorno-Karabakh War, with impunity. The
Caucasian Albanian claim, however, is a threat to Armenian cultural
heritage during peacetime — or rather, whenever Armenian cultural
heritage finds itself inside the borders of Azerbaijan. And,
unfortunately, there is no formal mechanism in international law that
can protect these sites from Azerbaijan’s intentional destruction.

[Photo: Remnants of the damage to Gandzasar’s exterior, from
Azerbaijani aerial bombardment in the Nagorno-Karabakh War in the
1990s, are still visible to this day (2010).]

As long as Azerbaijan lays claim to Nagorno-Karabakh, the region’s
Armenian cultural heritage sites are at grave risk. Because these
sites predate the concept of an Azerbaijani national identity by over
a millennium (in some cases, two millennia), because many of them
predate even Azerbaijan’s predominant religion (Islam) by several
centuries, and because they predate the appearance of Azerbaijan’s
ethnic forefathers (the Turkic tribes from Central Asia), their
existence threatens and directly undermines Azerbaijan’s historical
claims to this region.

Azerbaijan employs its Caucasian Albanian argument to tie itself to a
vanished Christian civilization in the South Caucasus, in order to
remove a living one: the Armenians. Despite espousing the notion that
Armenian cultural heritage is Caucasian Albanian and thus
proto-Azerbaijani, as applied to other regions, such claims have not
stopped Azerbaijan from the wholesale destruction of both movable and
immovable Armenian cultural heritage that finds itself within
Azerbaijan’s changing borders. (Azerbaijan’s recent destruction of 89
Armenian churches and thousands of medieval cross-stones, called
khachkars, and Armenian tombstones in the exclave of Nakhichevan — as
reported in Hyperallergic — is but one glaring example.) Moreover,
although Azerbaijan claims Nagorno-Karabakh’s Christian religious
sites are proto-Azerbaijani, Azerbaijan has not nominated any of the
hundreds of churches and monuments in Nagorno-Karabakh to UNESCO’s
World Heritage List. But it has nominated a fortress in Shushi.
(Armenia is not able to nominate any sites because the United Nations
regards Nagorno-Karabakh as a territory lying within the borders of
Azerbaijan, contrary to Nagorno-Karabakh’s historical autonomy in the
Soviet period and the population’s later referendums on
self-determination during the breakup of the Soviet Union.)

The terms of the Trilateral Agreement require ethnic Armenians to
leave several districts of Nagorno-Karabakh, including the Aghdam
region which contains the partially excavated ruins of the second
century BCE Armenian city of Tigranakert (also shelled by Azerbaijan
during its recent aggression), the Lachin region (Kashatagh in
Armenian) which contains the fifth century CE Armenian church and
former monastery of Tzitzernabank, and the Kalbajar district
(Karvachar in Armenian) which contains many treasures of Armenian
religious heritage. In 2015, I secured a research grant from the
US-based National Association for Armenian Studies and Research
(NAASR) and set out to investigate the Caucasian Albanian claims as
they applied to three churches that were founded or rebuilt in the
13th century — located within the Dadivank and Gandzasar monastic
complexes in the Kalbajar district and Gitchavank in Hadrut. Under the
Trilateral Agreement, most of these monasteries are now under
Azerbaijani control and, for reasons I explain below, all three are
vulnerable to Azerbaijan’s cultural erasure if not outright
destruction.

Armenians have had an enduring presence in Nagorno-Karabakh for over
two millennia. In 189 BCE, under the Armenian King Artashes, the
region of Nagorno-Karabakh (then called “Artsakh”) became one of the
15 provinces of the Kingdom of Armenia. Two of the 12 apostles (Saints
Thaddeus and Bartholomew) were the first evangelizers of the Armenians
and were martyred, in the first century CE. Christianity, however,
continued to spread throughout the region, from the efforts of St.
Gregory the Illuminator — an Armenian-Parthian noble, raised in
Cappadocia (present-day Turkey). By roughly 301 CE, King Trdat III
made Christianity the official religion of the Kingdom of Armenia,
which included Artsakh.

[Map: Map of the Kingdom of Caucasian Albania, showing its relation to
the Kingdom of Armenia in 387 CE before the Armenian provinces of
Artsakh, Utik, and Syunik were combined to this region to create the
province of “New Albania” under the Sassanids (via and courtesy
Wikipedia)]

In 387 CE, the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires partitioned the Kingdom
of Armenia between themselves, resulting in Artsakh later becoming
part of the Persian province of New Albania in 428 CE. This province
combined the former Armenian regions of Artsakh, Utik, and Syunik to
the region of Albania — which was inhabited by the Caucasian
Albanians. Despite the Sassanid’s unsuccessful campaign of forced
assimilation, New Albania’s local princes largely maintained their
autonomy. During this period of autonomy, in the early fifth century,
St. Mesrop Mashtots invented the Armenian alphabet and opened the
first Armenian language school in New Albania, at the Amaras
Monastery. (Mashtots also later created an alphabet for the Caucasian
Albanians.)

The creation of the Armenian alphabet in the early fifth century
helped to homogenize Armenian culture, because it finally allowed
churches to conduct their liturgies in Armenian, rather than in Greek
or Syriac as they had been doing. Having an alphabet also allowed the
Armenians to differentiate themselves from the surrounding peoples and
to preserve their culture and identity, despite numerous later
attempts by empires and invaders to subsume and assimilate them. The
Armenian Apostolic Church’s split from Byzantium, following its
rejection of the Council of Chalcedon, also played strongly into the
Armenian conception of its inherent uniqueness.

The next several centuries saw multiple waves of migration through
Artsakh, including the Arabs, Seljuk Turks, and Mongols. The Arabs
arrived in the seventh century, usurped the Sassanid presence in the
region, and ruled there until the 10th century. Although the Arabs
converted many of the inhabitants of Transcaucasia to Islam, they were
unsuccessful in changing the religious character of most ethnic
Armenians. In The History of the Albanians, Movsēs Dasxuranci, writing
in the 10th century, explains how the Armenian and Caucasian Albanian
noble families allied with one another in the seventh century, often
through intermarriage, to fight the Arabs. By the end of the 10th
century, there was no longer a distinction between the Armenian and
Caucasian Albanian inhabitants of New Albania. Indeed, by the end of
Dasxuranci’s chronicles, the Prince of Albania was referred to as “Abu
Ali, the native Armenian,” the brother of the Armenian King Smbat.

In the 11th century, Turkic tribes invaded from central Asia and
created the Seljuk Empire in 1071 CE. Many historians argue that the
Seljuk Turks’ most important legacy was linguistic, because the
Turkish language led to multiple semi-nomadic tribes in Transcaucasia
identifying as Turks, despite their lack of Turkish ethnicity. By the
end of the century, however, the Christians regained their
independence, and the Armenian princes took control of the region. The
12th century ushered in a period of feudal states, which resulted in
the construction of many monastic foundations.

When the Mongols invaded in 1235 CE, they destroyed much of
Transcaucasia and settled semi-nomadic Turkish and Kurdish mercenaries
in the area, resulting in the disappearance of several Armenian
princely families who were either killed or exiled. The Turkish
linguistic influences deepened with the arrival of the Oghuz Turks who
founded the Ottoman Empire in 1299, and, after two successful wars
with the Persians and Safavid Iran, consolidated their occupation of
the region in the early 16th century. These gains, however, lasted
little more than a century. Russia soon entered the sphere, resulting
in a three-way struggle over the region between Ottoman Turkey,
Imperial Russia, and Safavid Iran.
In addition to being the first Armenian language school in the 5th
century, Amaras Monastery contains the burial tomb of St. Grigoris,
the grandson of St. Gregory the Illuminator, and the Catholicos of New
Albania. Amaras was plundered in the 13th century by the Mongols,
desecrated in 1387 by the campaigns of the “Sword of Islam” Tamerlane,
and demolished once again in the 16th century only to be rebuilt in
the 17th with fortified walls, then later abandoned, then used by
Russian Imperial troops as a frontier fortress, then rebuilt and its
church reconsecrated in 1858 with funds from the Armenians of the city
of Shushi. This photograph was taken in 2015.

[Photo: A different view of Amaras’s crypt, 2015]

In contrast to the largely homogenous Armenian self-identity,
Azerbaijani identity developed more recently and looks externally. The
first references to this Turkic-speaking population as “Azerbaijani”
and “Azeri” appeared in the early 20th century, upon the formation of
the short-lived Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in 1918. Prior to that,
the population was referred to as the “Caucasian Tatars” or simply
“Tatars.” Unlike Armenians who had a distinct language, alphabet, and
religion, Azerbaijanis looked outward — identifying both with Turks,
linguistically and ethnically, and with Iranians, religiously, due to
their shared Shia’a Muslim faith. This split between the Turkic and
Persian worlds may have made it difficult to develop a distinct
Azerbaijani national or ethnic consciousness.

The Caucasian Tatars’ claims to Nagorno-Karabakh originate in the late
19th century, after the Russians created the Elisabethpol Governate in
1868, by carving out Karabakh and annexing it to the plains to the
east, which were inhabited by various semi-nomadic herding populations
(such as the Caucasian Tatars, Talysh, Tat, and Lezgin people). This
territorial reorganization created competing claims to
Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the 20th century,
which were further exacerbated by Joseph Stalin’s decision in the
Soviet period to overrule the Caucasian Bureau of the Communist Party
and place the Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast within the newly
created Azerbaijan SSR rather than in the Armenia SSR.

[Photo: The view from Shushi in 2010]

In the early 20th century, the concept of Pan-Turkism greatly
influenced Azerbaijani self-identity. Pan-Turkism, which propagated
during the decline of the Ottoman Empire, espoused the union of all
Turkic peoples from the Balkans to western China — with Armenia being
the only geographic obstacle dividing a unified Turkish world.
Moreover, after the Ottomans’ “Islamic Army of the Caucasus” invaded
Armenia towards the end of World War I to support Azerbaijani claims
to Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenians began to equate the Caucasian
Tatars with the Ottoman and Young Turk perpetrators of the Armenian
pogroms of 1895–1896 and the Armenian Genocide of 1915.

Of course, the presence of Armenian cultural sites — which predate the
Caucasian Tatars’ presence in the region by several centuries —
created a problem for Azerbaijan’s territorial claims, since they
undermine any so-called historical rights that Azerbaijan has to
Nagorno-Karabakh. Moreover, while no one would deny that numerous
ethnic groups lived in Transcaucasia and contributed to its
multifaceted cultural landscape, it is hard to believe that the
Caucasian Tatars, whose identity was shaped by their adoption of
Islam, can be the inheritors of Christian religious sites. As ethnic
Armenians began to exercise their rights to self-determination and
Nagorno-Karabakh’s majority Armenian population voiced their demands
to secede from Azerbaijan SSR in accordance with the Soviet
Constitution, Azerbaijan’s already tenuous ties to Nagorno-Karabakh
required a stronger case.

Enter Caucasian Albanian historiography. Caucasian Albanian
historiography, which claims a direct link between present-day
Azerbaijanis and the vanished Caucasian Albanians, has its roots in
1947, when a group of Azerbaijani archaeologists discovered remnants
of Caucasian Albanian writing in the Azerbaijan SSR. Linking
Azerbaijanis to the extinct Caucasian Albanians was one permissible
way in which to construct a national identity within the Soviet Union,
which encouraged academics to engage in historiography to legitimize
the creation of the Soviet republics and their borders but would have
frowned on Azerbaijan’s Muslim, Turkish, and Iranian associations. In
1965, Ziya Bünyadov, the father of Azerbaijani historiography,
published a book on the history of Caucasian Albania during the Arab
period, titled Azerbaijan in the 7th to 9th Centuries. Among several
dubious claims that underlie his construction of an Azerbaijani
national identity, Bünyadov posited that Movsēs Dasxuranci’s 10th
century History of the Albanians was originally written in Caucasian
Albanian (not Armenian) and later translated into Armenian and
destroyed, though no evidence for this claim exists and several
scholars later showed that Bünyadov had falsified his translations,
omitting reference to Dasxuranci’s Armenian heritage as well as that
of many of the historical players who were clearly described as
Armenian. Bünyadov also theorized that the Armenian princes of
Nagorno-Karabakh, such as the Beglarians and Hasan Jalal — whose names
you will see on the founding inscriptions adorning several Armenian
cathedrals — were not ethnically Armenian but were instead
Armenianized Albanians.

In 1986, Bünyadov’s student, Farida D. Mamedova, argued that the
geographic and political boundaries of Caucasian Albania were far more
extensive than previously accepted. Mamedova portrayed the Caucasian
Albanians as an integrated ethnic group and argued that medieval
Nagorno-Karabakh was not Armenian and that St. Mesrop Mashtots (the
creator of the Armenian alphabet) did not create the Armenian alphabet
but instead reformed the Caucasian Albanian one. She further argued
that the Caucasian Albanian Church was independent of the Armenian
Apostolic Church for centuries and was only subsumed by the Armenian
Apostolic Church after the Arab conquest.

To be clear, Bünyadov and Mamedova’s purpose was to remove any
mediation between the vanished Caucasian Albanians and the living
Armenians, while claiming for Azerbaijanis an ancient, albeit
Christian, indigenous identity. Although just about every
non-Azerbaijani historian who has touched the subject has heavily
criticized Bünyadov and Mamedova’s scholarship, their revisionist
mythology succeeded in planting the notion in current Azerbaijani
consciousness that it is not the Armenians but rather the Caucasian
Tatars that are the descendants of the Christianized Caucasian
Albanians and, by extension, the ancient and rightful owners of
Nagorno-Karabakh.

Though there was coexistence between Armenians and Caucasian Albanians
in Artsakh, as evidenced by their deep religious exchange, Azerbaijani
Caucasian Albanian historiography attempts to use every reference to
New Albania, Albania, or “Aghvank” in Armenian as a reference to
Caucasian Albania, to obfuscate the Armenian presence in the region.
Similarly, the claim that many Armenian princes were not Armenian at
all requires one to disbelieve everything that contemporaneous
historians wrote about these princes. For example, one would have to
believe that Hasan Jalal’s title as “Prince of Armenia” was in name
only and somehow did not define his ethnicity. And while Armenian and
Caucasian Albanian noble families allied with one another, often
through intermarriage, to fight the Arabs, by the end of Dasxuranci’s
10th century chronicles, the Prince of Albania was “Abu Ali, the
native Armenian,” the brother of the Armenian King Smbat — meaning
that in Nagorno-Karabakh the Armenian and Albanian identities had
blurred.

More recent Azerbaijani historiography has gone even further to remove
Armenians from their homeland, claiming that the Russians and Iranians
introduced Armenians to certain parts of Armenia (such as its capital
Yerevan) and Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 19th century. Azerbaijani
academics prop up such claims with sloppy references to Russian
population surveys and fashioning for themselves a cloak of
credibility by citing respected academics such as George A.
Bournoutian (perverting their work in the process), while Azerbaijani
officials at the highest levels posit that large portions of Armenia,
such as Yerevan, Sevan, and Zangezur are “historically” Azerbaijani
territory.

What does the Caucasian Albanian claim mean for Nagorno-Karabakh’s
cultural heritage, and why do many scholars fear that these sites face
“cultural erasure”? Well, for starters, it means that any elements of
these sites that contain unique or distinctive Armenian
characteristics (that cannot be passed off as Caucasian Albanian) will
be destroyed. This includes the following:

(1) Cupola: Most of the Armenian cathedrals in the region, including
those found in the Dadivank, Gandzasar, and Gtichavank monastic
complexes, exhibit similar architectural features to those of the
Etchmiadzin Cathedral in Armenia, which is the holy mother church of
the Armenian Apostolic Church and one of the oldest churches in the
world. These architectural features include a cruciform plan topped by
a rounded and pointed dome (i.e., cupola). The cupola is one of the
most recognized features of Armenian sacred spaces. Already, from
Azerbaijani-controlled Shushi, we are seeing photos of Azerbaijan’s
post-ceasefire destruction of the “Kanach Zham” (Green Chapel)
Armenian Church of St. John the Baptist by the removal of its cupola.
True to its revisionist tactics, Azerbaijan claims, without any basis,
that the early 19th century Kanach Zham church is not Armenian but
Russian Orthodox.

[Photo: Gtichavank in Hadrut was undergoing extensive restoration
before Azerbaijan’s recent military aggression (2015); this cathedral
is now under Azerbaijani control.]

(2) Founding Inscriptions and Donor Portraits: Two other distinctive
elements of Armenian cultural heritage are inscriptions explaining the
church’s founding and accompanying portraits of the church’s donors.
Donor portraits are particularly unique to Armenian churches in the
region, the most notable of which were created in the ninth and 10th
centuries by the Bagratuni dynasty, and which typically depict a model
of the church in the hands of its donor. As such, inscriptions and
donor portraits are the most problematic elements for Azerbaijan’s
claims that Armenian churches are Caucasian Albanian, because the
inscriptions are engraved using the Armenian alphabet and the donor
portraits document and depict the Armenian nobles that commissioned
the cathedrals and gave land for the monastic sites. Azerbaijani
revisionism posits, again with no basis, that these inscriptions were
added by Armenians centuries later to hide the Caucasian Albanian
provenance of these cathedrals. Accordingly, if given the opportunity,
many people fear that Azerbaijan will erase
Nagorno-Karabakh’s cathedrals of their Armenian inscriptions. Already,
the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense released a video from Dadivank,
and in the footage Dadivank’s inscriptions (which are prevalent on
both the interior and exterior walls of the cathedral) are tellingly
absent.

[Photo: Dadivank’s exterior donor portraits, and various carving on
the facade engraved in Armenian characters.]

At Dadivank, for example, the inscriptions explain in medieval
Armenian that in 1214 CE Queen Arzou of Haterk funded the construction
of the church in her sons’ memory and to fulfill their promise, as
they had intended to build the church themselves but were unable to do
so because of their untimely deaths:

    I, Arzou-Khatoun, obedient servant of Christ … wife of King
Vakhtang, ruler of Haterk and all Upper Khachen, with great hopes
built this holy cathedral on the place where my husband and sons rest
in peace. My first-born Hasan martyred for his Christian faith in the
war against the Turks, and, three years later, my younger son Grigor
also joined Christ. Completed in the year 663 [in the Armenian
calendar].

On the cathedral’s southern façade, the two sons, Princes Hasan and
Grigor, are depicted presenting a model of the church.

[Photo: Gandzasar’s donor portraits, depicting the Armenian prince
Hasan-Jalal (2015)]

At Gandzasar, which became the burial place of the Armenian princes of
Khachen in 1216 CE, the donation inscriptions are engraved within the
interior of the church, in its most sacred spaces. On the north wall,
an inscription describes Prince Hasan Jalal Dawla’s wish to commission
the Gandzasar Monastery, the construction of which began in 1216 and
lasted until 1238. The donor portrait on the exterior of the church,
on the dome, depicts Prince Hasan Jalal sitting cross-legged with a
model of the church — a device meant to project power at the Seljuk
court. Despite adopting an Arabic-influenced name as was fashionable
at the time, Prince Hasan Jalal Dawla (Grand Prince of the Armenian
dynasty of Khachen) was described by his contemporaries as Armenian:
“Hasan, the great prince of Xach’ēn and Arts’ax region, whom they
endearingly called Jalal, a pious religious man and a modest Armenian
by nationality.” Azerbaijani revisionists such as Bünyadov and
Mamedova, however, claim that Prince Hasan Jalal Dawla was not
Armenian but Caucasian Albanian.

(3) Khachkars: The cross, which represents Jesus’s crucifixion and
salvation through that crucifixion, is an important part of worship
for Armenian Christians in their meditative and devotional practices.
Armenians create what are known as khachkars — intricately carved
Armenian cross-stones that contain a cross resting on the symbol of a
sun or an eternity symbol. Khachkars are on UNESCO’s Representative
List of the Intangible Heritage of Humanity. They dot both Armenia and
Nagorno-Karabakh’s landscape; you will find them along roads, at the
top of mountains, and, of course, in churches and cemeteries — their
bases often covered in melted wax from candles lit by praying
Christians. Recent footage from Hadrut shows Azerbaijani military
personnel destroying a khachkar in Hadrut, a region Azerbaijan claimed
during its recent military advance.

[Photo: A view of Gtichavank’s monastic buildings in 2015 with a large
khachkar embedded into the facade]

There are over 4,000 Armenian cultural sites in Nagorno-Karabakh,
including 370 churches. Now that most of this cultural heritage is in
Azerbaijan’s de facto control, even with the presence of Russian
peacekeepers in certain regions, there is little hope that Azerbaijan
will not destroy them. Most experts predict that Azerbaijan’s cultural
genocide will occur slowly over many years, if not decades, starting
with the more recent Armenian churches, dating to the 17th to 19th
centuries (as with Ghazanchetsots and Kanach Zham in Shushi) before
moving on to the older, lesser known sites (such as Okhte Drni in
Hadrut and Yeghishe Arakyal near Madagiz, which contains the tomb of
the king of the Caucasian Albanians, “Vachagan the Pious”), and
finally to the crown jewels of Armenian cultural heritage (such as
Dadivank).

In fact, Azerbaijan thwarts even preliminary efforts to safeguard this
cultural heritage by continuing to deny entry to independent experts
seeking to inventory and assess the status of Nagorno-Karabakh’s
sites. (This, of course, makes it easier to destroy Armenian sites and
later claim they never existed, as Azerbaijan did in its exclave of
Nakhichevan.) On December 21, 2020, UNESCO issued a press release
lamenting Azerbaijan’s lack of cooperation with UNESCO’s request to
send an independent, technical mission of experts to Nagorno-Karabakh
— a decision of UNESCO’s Second Protocol Committee that Azerbaijan
reportedly had tried to prevent.

[Photo: Khachkars line the interior of Gandzasar’s monastic walls (2009)]

Nagorno-Karabakh’s Christian religious sites unquestionably refer to a
unique Armenian visual tradition. Nevertheless, trying to disentangle
what Christian heritage is exclusively Armenian versus Caucasian
Albanian is beside the point: Living Armenians use and venerate these
sites and living Armenians are now excluded from these sites.
Therefore, the calls to save Armenian cultural heritage are not pleas
to preserve an extinct indigenous group’s millennia-old monuments for
future tourist attractions; they are an urgent demand to stop an
ongoing cultural genocide, which has seen hundreds of Armenian sites
erased from present-day Turkey and the South Caucasus. For now,
however, Nagorno-Karabakh’s sites still stand after hundreds of years
of conquest and are a living witness to the region’s long Christian
heritage. Nagorno-Karabakh’s cultural landscape thus poses a
formidable challenge to modern, competing territorial claims. Any
ethnic group laying claim to Nagorno-Karabakh must first explain its
ties to these cultural monuments. Or, in Azerbaijan’s case, it must
first explain them and then erase them.

Yelena Ambartsumian is a New York lawyer and founder of OrigenArt.com.
She is a descendant of the Sumbatian princely family, which moved from
Artsakh to Baku during the late 19th century.