The Caucasus Heritage Watch has documented the destruction of the 18-19th c. Armenian church of St. Sargis in the Mokhrenes village, Hadrut, Nagorno-Karabakh.

The village has been largely destroyed too.

The destruction of St. Sargis represents the first major violation of the December 2021 International Court of Justice (ICJ) provisional measure that ordered Azerbaijan to “prevent and punish acts of vandalism and desecration affecting Armenian cultural heritage…”

Satellite imagery shows that St. Sargis was destroyed between March and July 2022. In the March satellite image, the church is difficult to distinguish from ground surface due to roof vegetation. But the roof ridge can be seen and the surrounding village is intact.

Over the past two years, the Azerbaijani authorities have been systematically desecrating or destroying Armenian monuments in Karabakh. At least two other churches have been torn down since a Russian-brokered ceasefire stopped the war, and entire villages have been razed to the ground.

Concerns about the preservation of cultural sites in Nagorno-Karabakh are made all the more urgent by the Azerbaijani government’s history of systemically destroying indigenous Armenian heritage—acts of both warfare and historical revisionism. The Azerbaijani government has secretly destroyed a striking number of cultural and religious artifacts in the late 20th century. Within Nakhichevan alone, a historically Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani forces destroyed at least 89 medieval churches, 5,840 khachkars (Armenian cross stones) and 22,000 historical tombstones between 1997 and 2006.