Azerbaijani heritage in Armenia - who will be responsible for the destruction?

The Union of Armenians of Russia has decided to join the struggle for the "Armenian heritage" in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. Ara Abrahamyan's office accused Baku of all its sins and called on Armenians to unite and overthrow the government of Nikol Pashinyan, which is unable to prevent the return of law and order to the liberated territories. The SAR believes that Yerevan has some opportunities to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign country, but Pashinyan simply does not want to do so.

After the Second Karabakh War, and then after the anti-terrorist operation in 2023, Ara Abrahamyan repeatedly bombed UNESCO with appeals, demanding to organize a mission to promote the "thousand-year-old Armenian heritage." For some reason, UNESCO has always been very attentive to Armenian complaints.

The complaints of the Armenian side did not go unnoticed. But the missions were disrupted because, despite the changing geopolitical realities, the international structure still lived by the concepts of the past. At the end of 2023, the mission's arrival was disrupted because European experts did not want to travel to Khankendi through Aghdam and record what the occupiers had done. UNESCO stated that they want to go directly to Khankendi and assess and document the condition of only Armenian sites. Of course, the mission did not take place. UNESCO experts lost the opportunity to visit Khankendi, as they considered that the destroyed Aghdam was "different." A couple of new buildings from the occupation turned out to be more important than the Azerbaijani cities that were razed to the ground.

Abrahamyan even tried to bribe UNESCO by offering to pay for the organization of an international conference under its auspices, which would prove that the entire Albanian heritage of Karabakh belongs to Armenians. A fraudster selling "bloody" African diamonds actually offered an international organization a bribe.

Today, Abrahamyan angrily recalls that Azerbaijan did not allow the UNESCO mission to Karabakh, but does not say anything about why the experts' visit did not take place. He also does not mention that during the years of occupation, Yerevan did not allow missions to the occupied territories, and the organization did not particularly insist. Azerbaijan was told that it was a humanitarian organization that could not interfere in politics.

The Diaspora is making noise in vain. There will be no missions for the sake of the "Armenian heritage" today. At least because Baku strictly adheres to the position of mirroring. If international organizations want to monitor the state of the "Armenian heritage" in Azerbaijan, they will be able to do so only under the condition of parallel monitoring of the state of the Azerbaijani heritage in Armenia. There will be no compromises or concessions. 

Armenia will never go on a parallel mission. Because she will have nothing to show. The fact that the entire Azerbaijani and Turkic heritage has been destroyed does not mean that it did not exist. Azerbaijan has provided UNESCO with facts, photographic materials, archival evidence, that is, a complete set that allows opening a case against Armenia, where an unprecedented, simply monstrous genocide was carried out against the historical and cultural heritage of the indigenous population. After the 2020 war, Azerbaijan demanded for the first time that UNESCO organize monitoring of Azerbaijani heritage in Armenia. In February 2022, at the talks of the heads of Azerbaijan, Armenia, France and the European Council, an agreement was reached on sending a mission to both South Caucasian countries. However, nothing came of it, because the Armenian side evaded its obligations, which was quite expected, because it had nothing to show. But I'd have to explain where it all went.

As can be found from open sources, according to the Caucasian Calendar for 1870, published in Russian, 269 mosques were registered in the Irevan province, and 156 in the Elizavetpol province. According to another source, in 1915 there was an increase in the number of mosques in the territory of the Irevan and Zangezur provinces - a total of 382 Shiite and 9 Sunni mosques. However, after the establishment of the Armenian Republic on Azerbaijani lands, all mosques were destroyed. Today, only one Irevan mosque, the Blue Mosque, has remained intact, but has been turned into a "Persian" mosque. The penultimate one, Demirbulagskaya, was destroyed after the outbreak of the conflict.

It may be objected that all mosques were destroyed during the time of militant atheism. Of course, there were some, but the complete destruction of all traces of the historical presence of Azerbaijanis in Armenia did not take place within the framework of the fight against "opium for the people." It was a systematic process with specific goals. It was fully completed after the expulsion of the last Azerbaijani from the Armenian SSR in the late 80s of the last century. Mosques were demolished, historical and cultural monuments were destroyed, and the real names of cities and villages, rivers and lakes were finally erased.

The heritage was destroyed, and all traces of vandalism were literally rolled into the asphalt.

A curious fact. In October 2008, Russia Square was inaugurated in the center of Yerevan. In his speech at the ceremony, Serzh Sargsyan accidentally let slip. He called it symbolic that "the Erevan Fortress was once located very close here, which reflects the breadth of Armenian-Russian relations." Russian Russian flag was first raised on October 1, 1827, where the Russian garrison of General Paskevich stood, where Griboyedov's immortal comedy "Woe from Wit" was first staged in the presence of the author, and so on.

Sargsyan did not specify that Griboyedov's play was shown at the Sardar Palace. It was a magnificent building, which remains today only in photographs. Just like the fortress itself.

The central part of the Armenian capital is now located on the site of the Irevan fortress with all its buildings, including the Sardar Palace, 2 mosques, 800 houses, gardens, baths, a unique water supply system and other buildings. The fortress was partially destroyed by the earthquake of 1864, but the architecture was preserved and could have been restored during the Soviet period, if not for the criminal general plan of Yerevan, designed to completely erase the traces of the Turkic, Muslim history of this Azerbaijani city.

It is wrong to say that Yerevan does not have a historical center. It actually exists, it's just underground, and Yerevan residents, walking through the center, do not realize that they are trampling on the true history of their city.

In 2003, during the reconstruction of Republic Square, workers came across ancient stone walls. According to Armenian media, after the top layer of asphalt was removed, the builders saw the remains of stone walls, black and red tuff tiles, tiles, pieces of clay jugs, and clay water pipes. The underground city stretches right under the central streets, Republic Square and stretches all the way to Tepebashi district (now Kond). It was found that these were not the buildings themselves, but the lower floors and basements of buildings from the 17th century, which were allegedly destroyed during one of the earthquakes.

A lot of interesting things were found underground, and initially victory trumpets began to play in scientific circles and in the media. "If the city is opened, the whole world will be shocked by this discovery," they said in Yerevan. However, the Armenians have changed their minds about surprising the world. Very soon, the underground city was filled in and paved over again. Officials explained that the find had no cultural value.

The next time historical Yerevan made itself felt was in 2019, when road works were carried out on the square again. Nikol Pashinyan was already in power, who was not experienced in historical myths and happily jumped at the idea of creating a museum under glass in the city center. However, representatives of scientific circles and propaganda popularly explained to him that this should never be done. A curious comment about the find was made by Russian architect Andrey Ivanov to the Armenian media. He warned that if the finds were discovered, the Armenian authorities should be ready to "convincingly respond to the ideological challenges associated with the disclosure of the historical layers of multicultural Erivan." Although Ivanov is the popularizer of "Armenian Yerevan," as an expert, he perfectly understood what was under the main square and why it was better to bury it back.

Interestingly, this architect, who promotes the "antiquity" of Yerevan, could not answer a simple question - why does the city have no historical center? Although he knows the answer perfectly well. A few years ago, a dispute broke out between him and Azerbaijani political scientist Fuad Akhundov, and in this discussion Ivanov was laid on both shoulders. Because it is difficult to find words to object to the following arguments of the Azerbaijani:

"... let me remind you that in no city in the world with defensive traditions has the fortress been destroyed. Everywhere it is a historical center, a place of pilgrimage for tourists. It is difficult to imagine Moscow without the towers of the Kremlin, St. Petersburg without the dotted silhouette of the Peter and Paul Fortress, Warsaw without the Old Town, Cairo and Jerusalem without the city citadel. Residents of the vast majority of cities around the world carefully preserve ancient walls and towers, the historical heritage of past generations. And it doesn't matter if it's "his" legacy or not. In Spanish Cordoba, even a layman can clearly distinguish the features of the Arab architectural heritage, and the main cathedral, rebuilt from a mosque, is still called "La Miasquita" by residents today, centuries after the fall of the Cordoba caliphate. In Syria, you can still see forts and fortresses built by the Crusaders, who left a bad memory about themselves. But everything was destroyed in Yerevan. Armenians falsely claim that Yerevan is 29 years older than Rome. But why is it that in Rome, which was bombed during the war, all the monuments of antiquity, starting from prehistoric times, have been preserved, but not in Yerevan? Because there were Azerbaijani ancient monuments that were alien to the Armenians, which, unlike the Albanian churches, could not be called Armenian. And for this reason they were destroyed in the middle of the twentieth century! Instead of medieval monuments, thousands of fountains were installed, which allegedly correspond to the ancient age of Yerevan."