The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem issues its firm condemnation of the recent presentation at the Monastery of Gandzasar in Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh).
In the presence of diplomats and other foreign representatives, officials representing the Aliyev regime displayed museum reproductions of manuscripts, while advancing claims that sought to detach the site from its established Armenian Christian identity. Such a staging attempts to diminish the Armenian Christian heritage of Artsakh and to cast doubt upon its wider recognition. The history of the Armenian Apostolic Church stands upon a foundation long examined and affirmed by independent scholarship. This heritage has been documented for centuries and remains accessible through primary sources and is preserved within major repositories.
We address the diplomats who took part in the visit to the monastery in Gandzasar. We assert that you were brought into a carefully arranged presentation in which museum reproductions were offered as evidence against the established Armenian Christian identity of the site. By accepting that framing without the vetting and due diligence of independent examination, your visit lent the weight of your diplomatic presence to an ongoing political effort by the Aliyev regime which aims to detach Artsakh’s Christian monuments from their well-documented history. Your diplomatic engagements carry a responsibility to recognize when a host government is staging selective material for propagandized effect. Your failure to do so has allowed contested claims to circulate under the guise of official observation and has weakened the standard of due diligence that is required by your profession.
Moreover, we assert that lasting peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan must not come at the expense of desecrating Armenian cultural heritage. As one of the four Sees of the Armenian Apostolic Church and as the oldest Armenian diasporan institution in the world, we call upon those within the American government who present themselves as guarantors of these peace efforts to recognize that any proposed peace must rest on the foundations of historical truth.
Read also
We call upon the Government of Armenia to properly condemn these acts of historical revisionism and the very state that is carrying them out while speaking of peace. We assert that a country that offers diplomatic assurances with one hand and stages the public degradation of our Armenian Christian monuments with the other, cannot serve as an authentic partner in such a peace.
Furthermore, we assert that any peace agreement concluded under these revisionist narratives will remain without substance and is destined to fail. The Republic of Armenia must issue a forceful condemnation. The Armenian government’s recent adoption of silence and half-measures in the face of these open desecrations of Armenian Christian heritage only encourage further acts of historical and religious revisionism. We call upon those factions within the Armenian government who remain hesitant to renounce and condemn these acts not to be ashamed of their Armenian Christian identity in deference to globalist-era diplomacy that demands Christian nations to disregard their histories for temporary measures of geopolitical stability.
We remind these factions within the Armenian government that their hesitation in condemning these acts do not under any circumstances amount to statesmanship. It is rather a capitulation of the memory of Armenian Christians who still look to their leaders for the defense of that memory. The Armenian government bears the duty to stand without apology for the Christian heritage that has defined it for seventeen centuries.
The record shows that the government of Azerbaijan has found it necessary to devote considerable diplomatic resources in seeking external endorsements, including through lobbying efforts directed toward the Vatican for a revised account of Christian history within its borders. The Armenian Apostolic Church has never required such campaigns to establish the standing of its tradition. That tradition has long been received as a subject of serious study and exhibition by institutions of recognized authority, among them the Matenadaran in Yerevan, the extensive Armenian manuscript holdings of the British Library, the collections of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Mekhitarist libraries of Venice and Vienna, the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the endowed chairs in Armenian studies at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, UCLA, and Columbia University. These centers engage with Armenological materials on their own scholarly merits, without the need for state-sponsored lobbying and expenditure.
The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem will continue to affirm the integrity of this Armenian Christian heritage, in Jerusalem and in every place where the Armenian Christian memory of Artsakh is placed in question.
The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem