Cultural Genocide - Appropriation of Cultural Sites

In addition to concerns over the destruction of cultural sites, there are also examples of the Azerbaijani authorities appropriating Armenian cultural sites and relabelling them as Caucasian Albanian - also known as “Albanisation”. In his article “the Albanian Myth”, Russian historian and anthropologist Victor Schnirelmann explains that Azerbaijani academics have been “renaming prominent medieval Armenian political leaders, historians and writers, who lived in Nagorno Karabakh and Armenia into ‘Albanians’” in an effort to deprive “the population of early medieval Nagorno Karabakh of their Armenian heritage" and “cleanse Azerbaijan of Armenian history”. Thomas de Waal, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, commented on the political context of Azerbaijan’s historical revisionism as follows: “This rather bizarre argument has the strong political subtext that Nagorno Karabakh had in fact been Caucasian Albanian and that Armenians had no claim to it.”

The most concerning example of this came two days after the Ceasefire Agreement, when Azerbaijan’s First Deputy Minister of Culture, Anar Karimov, tweeted that the Armenian monastic complex of Dadivank was in fact Albanian, and that it had been subject to falsifications and alterations by the Armenian military in the 1990s. This claim has been roundly rejected by international academics. Dadivank has obvious Armenian cultural hallmarks, including inscriptions on the walls of nearly all of the churches in the complex and cross-stones in the Armenian alphabet; the distinctively Armenian church architecture and style; and the symbolism depicted on the cross-stones and churches. In addition, Caucasian Albanians were Islamised in the 8th century and assimilated into various Muslim ethnic groups by the 11th century, while Dadivank Monastery was built in the 9th – 13th century in an authentic Armenian style. Hundreds of other churches and cross-stones continued to be built in the region throughout the 13th – 18th centuries.

In a similar fashion, purported “restorations” of Armenian churches or monuments in the territory of Azerbaijan often result in devastating alterations aimed at erasing their Armenian origin. An example of this is the shocking “restoration” of the St. Yeghishe Church in the village of Nij in 2005, during which Armenian inscriptions on the church and nearby tombstones were deliberately erased.