The double defeat of Teimour Radjabov by Levon Aronyan on the chess tournament held in London was pegged as ‘shameful’ in Azerbaijan as the tournament was sponsored by the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) which spent 2 million euros on its organization.<…> Radjabov already became impudent back at the time of Heydar Aliyev. <…> It appears that after his marriage or more precisely after he started leading a lavish lifestyle, Radjabov has lost his form”. “On a tournament financed by Azerbaijan, a representative of our country has lost to an Armenian. The point is that no Azerbaijani chess player has a potential to win at this tournament. Spending millions of dollars to finance a tournament in London with participation of an Armenian in full awareness of this fact is a disgrace. How are our officials any different from the Arab sheikhs, who have a reputation of prodigal spenders, if they squander away over 2 million euros for Radjabov’s participation in the London tournament?”.426
14. Destruction of the cultural and historic Armenian heritage
The destruction of monuments of Armenian culture and history on the territory of Azerbaijan fulfills an important psychological task: the obliteration of historical symbols sacred for the enemy delivers a blow to the most vulnerable spot of the community. Arlene Audergon in her book entitled The War Hoteclass="underline" Psychological Dynamics in Violent Conflict notes that the destruction of culture has always been and continues to be one of the main terror tactics purporting to strip the victim of any memories linking him/her to the community.427
Here, the collective spirit as a whole is at stake. One way to erase human memory and retouch the history comes down to destroying monuments, statues and temples. The war on the historical legacy of Armenians waged on the territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan employs precisely this approach. A renowned orientalist and academician N. Y. Marr particularly noted with reference to Armenian khachkars: “this monument reflects each step of development of national architecture, and often combines both currents of the Armenian architecture: the spiritual and the secular. Khachkar truly represents the “memory of the land of our fathers” communicating with an extraordinary force and precision the spirit of the Armenian art”.
The sad fate of the Armenian memorial cemetery of Jugha, pearl of the world culture on the territory of the Armenian Nakhijevan, which was destroyed by order of the Azerbaijani authorities, must be viewed in this context.
“Nakhijevan of the ancient Armenians, Naxuana of classic writers, an uyezd city of the Erivan Governorate perched at an altitude of around 3,000 feet above sea level on the foothills of the Karabakh upland. According to legend, it was founded by Noah whose tomb is shown by local Armenians. Some Persian and Armenian historians date its foundation to 1539 B.C.428 A well-known orientalist Heinrich Hübschmann wrote that the toponym “Nakhijevan” originates from the Armenian prefix “nakh-” and the root “avan” meaning “the place of the first landing”.429
The region was known by ancient Greek authors by its name of either “Nakhijevan” or “Naxuana”. A Jewish historian Flavius Josephus calls the place “Apobatherion” – literal translation of the Armenian toponym. He wrote: “And then, when the ark stopped atop a mountain in Armenia, and Noah observed this, the latter opened it and seeing a patch of land near the ark hoped for the best and was reassured <…>. This place is referred by Armenians as “the site of the landing” and to this day they show there the remains preserved from the ark”.430
Throughout the 20th century, especially after the transfer of Armenian Nakhijevan “under the patronage” of the Soviet Azerbaijan, a program of de-Armenizing the region was launched, including a complete obliteration of ancient Armenian material culture. Incidentally, the Muslim population in Nakhijevan was so scant that even in the early nineteenth century there were only six mosques in the area. Meanwhile, the region had over 200 Armenian monasteries, churches and chapels.431
The khachkars of Jugha, the well-known cross-stones432 predominantly dating to the XIII–XVIII centuries, are marvelous monuments and distinctive specimens of Christian memorial architecture.
The French traveler Alexandre de Rhodes (1591–1660), who visited the area in 1648, wrote: “Beyond the walls of that city (Julfa), which is now only desert, I saw a beautiful monument to the ancient piety of Armenians. This is an extensive territory in which there are at least ten thousands of marble tombstones, all amazingly well engraved. A large white marble slab twelve feet height and eight feet wide can be seen at each grave with many beautiful shapes engraved around a large cross. It is very pleasing to see such a large number of marble slabs”.433
In 1603, one of the first British travelers to Persia and Armenia John Newbery, left the following entries in his memoirs:
Four days journey from Merenta [Maranda] and a day journey from Julfa, there is a wooden pontoon bridge; there was once a stone bridge, but it disintegrated. And Aras – this is the name the river – flows in front of the city, and the city itself lies at the foot of mountains. This city has three thousands houses and seven churches…434
It is widely known that in Middle Ages Jugha was a thriving Armenian city. However, in 1604, the Persian shah Abbas forcibly resettled its inhabitants to Isfahan, which to this day has an Armenian quarter known as New Jugha. Many travelers visited the ruins of the destroyed city and its cemetery over the years.
The British orientalist Sir William Ausley, who visited the city in 1812 and found the city fallen into a state of decay, wrote about the following: the largeness of its former population is evidenced by a rich and full cemetery placed on a sloping riverbank and covered with multiple rows of vertical tombstones, which, if looked not from afar, remind a gathering of people or even a regiment set in a close formation.435
The first steps in the scheme for obliteration of the Armenian monuments were taken in November 1998, when it was observed from the Iranian side of the border that some khachkars had been taken off their bases and smashed to pieces. Shortly after, they were all toppled.436 According to International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the Azerbaijani government eliminated 800 khachkars in 1998. Although the destruction was halted after protests from UNESCO, it, nevertheless, resumed four years later. By January 2003, a “1500-year-old cemetery was completely razed to the ground”. The President of ICOMOS Michael Petzet notes: “Now that all traces of this highly important historic site seem to have been extinguished all we can do is mourn the loss and protest against this totally senseless destruction”.437
In 1999, the president Heydar Aliyev in his speech pronounced “at a grand rally to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the foundation of the Soviet Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan” declared Nakhijevan as “one of the most ancient lands of Azerbaijan” with its history dating back 3,500 years and urged to “analyze, explore and write” the history of the region.438 It is after this statement that the final stage of obliterating the traces of Armenian presence in Nakhijevan was officially launched.