#jugha

The Archaeology of Power and Politics in Eurasia: Regimes and Revolutions (2012, Page 6): "Any political engagement with the past entails some kind of appropriation of the archaeological record as material evidence to legitimize an ideological claim... [P]olitical salience of archeological sites has made them targets for destruction (e.g., the Buddhas of Bamyan that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, or the medieval Armenian cemetery at Djulfa dismantled by the Azerbaijani army in 2005). Thus the physicality of the archaeological record lends itself to appropriation not only by modern techniques of memorialization but also by technologies of erasure and forgetting."

Armenian cross-stone ornaments from Julfa cemetery 

The Armenian cemetery in Julfa was a medieval-era cemetery near the town of Julfa, Nakhchivan, an exclave of the Republic of Azerbaijan that originally housed around 10,000 funerary monuments. The tombstones consisted mainly of thousands of khachkars, uniquely decorated cross-stones characteristic of medieval Christian Armenian art. The cemetery was still standing in the late 1990s, when the government of Azerbaijan began a systematic campaign to destroy the monuments. In the spring of 2006, a journalist from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting who visited the area reported that no visible traces of the cemetery remained. In the same year, photographs taken from Iran showed that the cemetery site had been turned into a military firing range. After studying and comparing satellite photos of Julfa taken in 2003 and 2009, in December 2010 the American Association for the Advancement of Science came to the conclusion that the cemetery was demolished and leveled.

хачкар, ст. Джуга Один из хачкаров в св. Эчмиадзине. 1602г. СТАРАЯ ДЖУГА [Photo by Tigran Amiryan]

The Armenians in their emigration from Old Ciulfa

The image above shows what no longer exists—the pre-destruction site of Old Julfa cemetery.

The largest khachkar cemetary in the world was located in Jugha (or Julfa, located today in Nakhichevan, Azerbaijan). The numbers were vastly reduced from the approximately 20,000 (monasteries, churches, tombstones, khatchkars, other cultural artifacts) that once stood during Soviet times to a mere few thousand, and after independence, Azerbaijan began to systematically destroy them. After an international outcry, the destruction was halted a few years, until 2005 when the entire cemetery was bulldozed completely clear.

IWPR: Famous Medieval Cemetery Vanishes

Artist Lusik Aguletsi, a Nakhichevan-born Armenian, also last visited the cemetery in 1987, although she was under escort.

“There is nothing like it in Armenia,” she said. “It was a thrilling sight. Two hills completely covered in khachkars. We weren’t allowed to draw or photograph them.”

Armenian experts now accuse Azerbaijan of a deliberate act of cultural vandalism.

“The destruction of the khachkars of Old Jugha means the destruction of an entire phenomenon in the history of humanity, because they are not only proof of the culture of the people who created them, they are also symbols that tell us about a particular cultural epoch,” said Hranush Kharatian, head of the Armenian government’s department for national and religious minorities.

“On the entire territory of Nakhichevan there existed 27,000 monasteries, churches, khachkars, tombstones and other Armenian monuments,” said Aivazian. “Today they have all been destroyed.”

Although the historical provenance of the cemetery is disputed in Azerbaijan, its cultural importance is confirmed by the 1986 Azerbaijani book “The Architecture of Ancient and Early Medieval Azerbaijan” by Davud Akhundov, which contains several photographs of the cross-stones of Jugha.