Azerbaijan’s Attempts To Rewrite Artsakh’s Christian History

Recently, the Azerbaijani government took some 150 foreign diplomats and representatives of international organizations to Gandzasar (13th century) and Dadivank (9th-13th century), two of Artsakh’s monasteries and historic centers of Armenian Christianity.  Accompanying them, the assistant to Azerbaijan’s president presented the sites as part of the “ancient Christian heritage of Caucasian Albania” and cast Gandzasar’s Armenian history as a later addition.

Sociologist and scholar of interethnic conflicts in the Caucasus, Dr. Hratch Tchilingirian examines such denialist efforts by the Azerbaijani state in a book chapter, which was recently highlighted in the media in Armenia and the Diaspora.  Tchilingirian’s study, titled “Reverse Engineering: A State-Created Albanian Apostolic Church,”—published in Caucasian Albania: An International Handbook (De Gruyter, 2023)—describes and analyzes how the Azerbaijani state is constructing an “Albanian Apostolic Church” narrative to claim Armenian Christian monuments as “evidence” of a different national past.

Dr. Tchilingirian,  who is Director of Institutional Innovation at the Western Diocese, writes: “The common features of this state-engineered narrative are denial of facts, erasure of evidence and reinvention of history, which goes back to Soviet times.”

For the benefit of those who wish to be better informed about the dubious “Albanization” of Armenian Christianity by an autocratic state, the open access of Dr. Tchilingirian’s study is available at this link. His open access book, The Struggle for Independence in the post-Soviet South Caucasus: Karabakh and Abkhazia (2003) is available through this link.