Armenian researcher Samvel Karapetyan, whose diligent documentation of remote medieval Armenian monuments in Nagorno-Karabakh has been dubbed "constructive ultra-nationalism," sees Azerbaijan’s destruction of Armenian monuments as an effort to neutralize Armenian "historical rights" or antiquity-derived political legitimacy in the region. LONDON. A delegation of European members of Parliament was last month refused access to Djulfa, in the Nakhichevan region of Azerbaijan, to investigate reports that an ancient Armenian Christian cemetery has been destroyed by Azerbaijani soldiers

The weather in the region is at freezing levels (hovering between -10-0° C, or 14-32º F.). In fact, all the civilians who did not leave their homes in territories which fell under Azerbaijan’s control were killed. In a wiretap recorded on June 3, 2009 at 14:13 hours, Mullah Muhammed asked for 1.2 million Turkish lira (some $780,000 at the exchange rate in effect at the time) from Büyükfırat, who was in Adana province. A Turkish prosecutor who had investigated Mullah Muhammed, a radical preacher who openly called for armed jihad, declared his support for Osama bin Laden and urged the beheading of Americans, listed the Baku-based Büyükfırat as a suspect in his investigation. When the wiretap was presented to Mullah Muhammed during questioning by the police, he denied having the conversation, while Büyükfırat claimed it was part of a business deal with his brother. Thus, they combine shootings and threats of the use of force with humanitarian issues like cutting off gas, mobile, and internet connections, or water, etc., to ruin the lives of those living in Artsakh. • On February 26, Armenian schoolchildren filmed a video of Azerbaijani armed forces threatening them and demanding they leave the village of Khramort in the Askeran region. The weather in the region is at freezing levels (hovering between -10-0° C, or 14-32º F.). Armenian culture has always had a precarious existence sandwiched between Russia and the Islamic spheres of Turkey and Iran. Nevertheless, many Armenian ruins - and a few renovated churches - do survive today across historical Armenia’s western regions in what is today Eastern Turkey. Similarly, a construction project completed in 2016 over the ruins of the hilltop castle Ernjak was promoted as "the restored Alinja fortress - the Machu-Picchu of Azerbaijan," with no reference to its deep Armenian past

Since Azerbaijan banned international fact-finders from visiting Nakhichevan, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) employed remote sensing technologies in its pioneer investigation into cultural destruction. Yet remote restoration of Nakhichevan’s lost Armenian monuments or alternative measures of accountability fall short of unanimous approval. Armenian researcher Samvel Karapetyan, whose diligent documentation of remote medieval Armenian monuments in Nagorno-Karabakh has been dubbed "constructive ultra-nationalism," sees Azerbaijan’s destruction of Armenian monuments as an effort to neutralize Armenian "historical rights" or antiquity-derived political legitimacy in the region. A groundbreaking forensic report tracks Azerbaijan’s recent destruction of 89 medieval churches, 5,840 intricate cross-stones, and 22,000 tombstones. Missing from the 522-page "Encyclopedia" are the 89 medieval churches, 5,840 intricate khachkars, and 22,000 tombstones that Ayvazyan had meticulously documented. Scottish researcher Steven Sim had traveled to post-Soviet Nakhichevan to assess the condition of the Armenian churches photographed earlier by Ayvazyan. Today, the scholar Argam Ayvazyan - like all those of Armenian ethnicity and background - is banned by Azerbaijan’s government from visiting his native Nakhichevan. It is not just Armenians who have been affected by Azerbaijan’s government-sanctioned destruction in Nakhichevan. Armenian lobby." These were the words used by Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev - successor to and son of KGB-leader-turned-President Heydar Aliyev - to describe reports of Djulfa’s destruction in an April 2006 speech. In fact, the Aliyev regime’s controversy-riddled diplomacy promotes Azerbaijan as a "land of tolerance." In 2012, the European Stability Initiative described Azerbaijan’s generous spending on lobbying and attempts to woo foreign allies as "caviar diplomacy." This petrodollar-funded campaign has entailed various donations, including cultural preservation grants of undisclosed sums to the Vatican

Alexander Nevsky Russian Orthodox Church that, according to Argam Ayvazyan, was built in 1862 by the Araskhanians, a prominent Armenian clan from Agulis. Likely due to three factors - its noticeable position on an international border, reputation as the world’s largest collection of khachkars, and previously voiced Armenian concerns for its preservation - Djulfa was the last major Armenian site in Nakhichevan to be destroyed. In his own words, he was personally appointed to this position by Necmettin Erbakan, the founder of political Islam in Turkey and formerly a mentor to current Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He reportedly witnessed the destruction of Agulis’s churches and quit his position as Member of Azerbaijan’s Parliament in protest of the late 2005 demolition of Djulfa. Unlike the self-publicized cultural destruction of ISIS, independent Azerbaijan’s covert campaign to re-engineer Nakhichevan’s historical landscape between 1997 and 2006 is little known outside the region. Other Armenian scholars perceive Azerbaijan’s anti-Armenian destruction as part of a larger agenda of realizing a vision of pan-Turkism: an ethnically homogenous Turkic polity comprising Turkey, Azerbaijan, and their ethnolinguistic brethren across Eurasia. In April 2011, when a US Ambassador traveled to Azerbaijan, on the southwestern edge of the former USSR, he was denied access to the riverside borderland that separates this South Caucasus nation from Iran. The Australian Catholic University’s former Julfa Cemetery Digital Repatriation Project, the brainchild of Judith Crispin, escort diyarbakır aimed to virtually recreate Djulfa with 3D imaging technologies. Photographs from 2006 taken from the Iranian side of the border showed that a military rifle range had been erected where the cemetery used to be, presumably by Azerbaijan’s armed forces, to rationalize the existence of the freshly flattened soil