Vice president and head of the Iranian Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Organization (CHTHO), Mohammad Ali Najafi protested the replacement of the Persian inscriptions on the tomb of the great Iranian poet Hakim Nizami by the Azeri government, IRNA said.

He lodged an official protest to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) over replacement of the Persian inscriptions on the tomb located in the Azerbaijani city of Ganja.

In his letter to UNESCO Head Irina Bokova, Najafi described the Azerbaijani move in removing the centuries-old tiles from the tomb as incomprehensible and non-cultural.

He also urged UNESCO, as the main trustee of cultural affairs in the international arena, to stop such non-cultural acts as soon as possible and restore the tomb to its original shape.

In August, the director of Nezami Ganjavi Centre of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS), Khalil Yusifli, announced his center’s plan to replace the tiles inscribed with poems in the Persian language in Nezami’s mausoleum with analogous poems in the Azerbaijani language.