Aliyev, wife visit medieval Armenian church Azerbaijan seeks to appropriate

PanARMENIAN.Net - Today, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his wife Mehriban Aliyeva visited the Karvachar region of occupied Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) and the Dadivank Armenian monastery, Azerbaijani medja report.

Azerbaijan claims that Dadivank, which is an integral part of the Armenian historical and cultural heritage, is an “Albanian Church”.

President of Azerbaijan seems to have deliberately chosen September 2 – the Independence Day of the Republic of Artsakh – for his trip.

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.