In the wake of months under siege and the renewal of armed assaults, the people of Nagorno-Karabakh face a tragic choice: remain on ancestral lands where their churches, cemeteries, and monasteries testify to centuries of communal life or flee in the face of what global experts describe as ethnic cleansing and even genocide. Tens of thousands have already embarked on the tragic journey overland to Armenia, draining the region of its largest indigenous community and leaving unguarded the memorials and monuments that testify to their history.
The Armenians fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh leave behind a rich cultural and religious landscape with scores of irreplaceable heritage sites, from exquisite medieval monasteries to modest village churches, to historic cemeteries with iconic engraved cross stones. The risk of destruction and falsification of these cultural and religious sites is immense. After the First Nagorno-Karabakh war, Azerbaijani authorities carried out a systematic program of cultural erasure in the Nakhchivan autonomous republic that our research team documented in painstaking detail. Since 2021, our high resolution satellite imagery has detected destruction, damage, and threats to historic churches and cemeteries located in regions that were ceded to Azerbaijan in 2020, irreplaceable monuments that testify to centuries of Armenian communal life.
Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) is working to expand our satellite monitoring of Armenian cultural heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh to include the hundreds of additional churches, monasteries, and historic cemeteries that have now passed to Azerbaijan’s jurisdiction. We estimate that an additional 200-300 Armenian cultural heritage sites are now newly endangered. Several relief organizations are actively working to help alleviate the terrible suffering of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh, who urgently need housing, food, medical attention, and so much more. CHW will continue our work to bear witness to the cultural heritage of the Armenians of the region in order to help protect it from erasure and preserve it for future generations when the region might some day see a just peace.
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