Watchdog: Azerbaijan turning Karabakh church into mosque

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Service for the Protection of Historical Environment and Cultural Museum-Reservations of Berdzor, Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh) has reported that Azerbaijan is turning the Church of Holy Resurrection (Surb Hambardzum Church) into a mosque.

The church is located on the southwestern outskirts of Berdzor, on a rocky slope on the left bank of the Akari River.

In 2022, 47 cultural monuments were evacuated from Berdzor, including khachkars, memorial stones, busts, and memorial springs.

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.