Some Azerbaijani Tall Tales

Vartan Matiossian

I recently came across an asinine piece crafted by some Azerbaijani "historian" and lodged at their "Presidential Library" meant to show the huge antiquity of Baku (1), which was an obscure Russian outpost in the nineteenth century until oil extraction started and Armenians, who were among the pioneering oilmen, became one of the main driving forces behind the building and embellishment the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, this is something those "historians" always fail to remember.

Emboldened by Ukraine Crisis, Azerbaijan Escalates its War on Armenian Heritage Sites

Simon Maghakyan

Yesterday, February 3, the government of Azerbaijan announced the creation of a state organ for purging politically-undesirable monuments in Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh in Armenian), the disputed Armenian region that Azerbaijan partially conquered in late 2020.

“A working group of specialists in [Caucasian] Albanian history and architecture has been set up to remove the fictitious traces written by Armenians,” pro-government media quoted Azerbaijan’s minister of culture Anar Karimov referencing a popular state-sponsored conspiracy theory that reimagines indigenous Armenian monuments as appropriated from an extinct civilization.

Azerbaijani Propaganda and Falsifications of Alexander Tamanyan’s ‘Russian Period’ Heritage

 Valeria Olyunina

Today we once again raise the issue of the destruction of Christian monuments in Nagorno-Karabakh, set before the international community by the new barbarians, who came to us from yesterday’s Soviet Republic, destroying not only the heritage of Armenians, but also that of the other ethnic groups of the Caucasus: Lezgins, Talyshes, Udins, and more. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and his authoritarian regime is equally biased toward destroying both Christian Armenian churches, as well as monuments to the heroes of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) and heroes of socialist labour of Armenian origin.