St. Hovhannes Mkrtich Church (Kanach Zham)

St. Hovhannes Mkrtich Church (known as Kanach Zham) was significantly impacted during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020. As we reported in CHW Monitoring Reports #1 and #2, the church originally possessed two cupolas, both clearly visible in baseline imagery from October 25, 2020 casting tall peaked shadows. An April 2021 image published in CHW Monitoring Report #2 showed the wartime damage to the structure which included the removal of the western cupola and a whole in the rook where the eastern cupola had been. Subsequent imagery, including the December 2023 image at right, indicated that the debris left by the 2020 fighting had been removed and some effort had been made to stabilize the eastern cupola and perhaps repair the hole in the roof. However, imagery released on Google Earth from April 4, 2024 clearly shows the complete demolition of the church.

To achieve a more precise date for the church’s destruction, CHW, in collaboration with our partners at Planet , developed a dual satellite monitoring approach. This method, which CHW first tested in our analysis of the “Red Cross” Church of Bina/Tumi , entails harnessing the complementary monitoring capabilities of two tiers of satellite imagery.

CHW’s established methodology tasks Planet’s SkySat constellation to provide imagery with high spatial resolution to detect impacts to cultural heritage sites. But these image sets have relatively low temporal resolution, typically with several months elapsing in between captures.

Thus, in the case of the St. John the Baptist Church in Shusha, our initial analysis and reporting used Planet’s SkySat imagery in combination with an Airbus image on GoogleEarth to date the destruction event between December 28, 2023, and April 4, 2024, a roughly three-month timespan. See the full investigation in the StoryMap linked below.