Artsakh’s Cultural Heritage Ombudsman Hovik Avanesov
The 17th century Holy Savior Monastery located near Təpəkənd/Tonashen in Azerbaijan’s Aghdara District has been damaged. Between October 2024 and August 2025, most of the metal roofing that had been added as part of a 2009 restoration (in then Nagorno-Karabakh) was removed.
Known in Armenian as Sb. Amenaprkich Vank (Napat), the complex includes a chapel and auxiliary building with an inscription and cross stones. Sources note a restoration in 1888. The below photos of the monastery were taken in 1989 and 2009, after the latest restoration. Learn more about its history and architecture here: https://tinyurl.com/3hwwy83s
This kind of scrap metal extraction recalls the looting of metal roofs from mosques and other architecture following the 1st Nagorno-Karabakh War, which CHW documented in our 2023 investigation, Between the Wars: https://tinyurl.com/2trmkvf5
The Holy Savior Monastery is not on Azerbaijan’s monument inventory. CHW calls on Azerbaijani authorities to add this historic site to the list as a 17th century Armenian monastery and accord it all due protections to ensure its preservation (https://www.facebook.com/share/p/14Q959pob3Z/ ) .
The systematic destruction, alteration, and removal of Armenian cultural heritage in the occupied territories of Artsakh can no longer be interpreted as mere negligence or collateral damage. It constitutes a central pillar of Azerbaijan’s state strategy, executed by an entrenched authoritarian regime that has repeatedly demonstrated its contempt for historical truth, cultural pluralism, and international legal norms.
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What is unfolding is not an accidental sequence of acts but a deliberate, long-term state policy of cultural eradication. Medieval monasteries are stripped, ancient khachkars disappear, inscriptions are defaced or falsified, and entire historical landscapes are being rewritten through state-sanctioned manipulation. This campaign aligns with what multiple scholars, institutions, and rights organizations identify as a coordinated cultural genocide—a strategic effort to eliminate the indigenous Armenian civilizational imprint from its ancestral geography.
By erasing Armenian heritage, the Azerbaijani regime seeks to annihilate the documentary and architectural record that testifies to centuries of Armenian presence. This is an attempt not only to falsify history but to secure territorial claims through the physical destruction of cultural evidence. Such a policy amounts to the weaponization of heritage destruction as an instrument of domination—an approach that places Azerbaijan’s ruling elite in open defiance of UNESCO conventions, the Hague principles, and the moral foundations of modern civilization.
Through these actions, the state demonstrates a posture fundamentally adversarial to the preservation of humanity’s shared cultural inheritance. Instead of acting as a responsible steward of the region’s multi-layered heritage, the regime behaves as a hostile force toward civilization itself, demolishing and concealing the cultural testimonies that contradict its political narratives.
The intensifying pattern of targeted demolitions, suppression of Armenian historical markers, and aggressive historical revisionism reflects an alarming political doctrine:
to eradicate a culture by erasing its material memory and replacing fact with state-manufactured mythology.
This doctrine—executed through administrative decrees, military occupation, state propaganda, and systematic heritage destruction—constitutes one of the most blatant contemporary examples of cultural persecution. It represents a moral and civilizational collapse within the governing structures of Azerbaijan, exposing a regime that sees cultural memory not as a value to preserve but as an obstacle to eliminate.
Unless the international community confronts this policy with the seriousness it demands, an irreplaceable chapter of humanity’s cultural history risks being permanently extinguished under a state apparatus that has chosen eradication over coexistence, falsification over truth, and destruction over civilization.
Ombudsman of the Cultural Heritage of Artsakh
