For nearly eight centuries, the cathedral of Gandzasar stood on its hilltop above the Khachen river valley, its carved dome visible for miles across Artsakh. Today it stands there still — but under new management, and, according to Armenian scholars and heritage monitors, being reworked in ways that threaten the very evidence of who built it.
Gandzasar was raised between 1216 and 1238 under the patronage of Prince Hasan-Jalal Dola of the Armenian principality of Khachen, and consecrated on 22 July 1240. From roughly 1400 until 1816 it served as the seat of the Catholicos of Aghvank, the branch of the Armenian Apostolic Church historically responsible for Artsakh and Utik. It remained an active church of the Armenian Apostolic Church right up until September 2023 — one of the longest unbroken religious histories of any monument in the South Caucasus. Its walls carry hundreds of Armenian lapidary inscriptions, many published and studied since the Soviet era, including in the classic corpus assembled by orientalist Ioseb Orbeli and later scholars (Wikipedia: Gandzasar Monastery).
The monastery had already survived one modern war. During the First Artsakh War, Azerbaijani forces shelled and targeted the complex, including with helicopter strikes in 1992; an unexploded shell fired at the site is still preserved there today. Restoration after that war was carried out between 1993 and 2009, financed in large part by the Armenian-Russian philanthropist Levon Hayrapetyan (Monument Watch: Gandzasar during the years of independence).
Azerbaijan’s offensive of 19–21 September 2023 ended the decades-long presence of Armenian self-governance in Nagorno-Karabakh and forced the exodus of more than 100,000 Armenians from the region. Gandzasar passed under Azerbaijani control along with the rest of Artsakh.
On 3 October 2023 — barely two weeks later — Azerbaijan’s Department of Monument Protection issued a statement asserting that the Armenian side had carried out “illegal” restoration and repair work at Gandzasar during the preceding decades, describing this as a violation of international norms (Monument Watch: Expropriation of Gandzasar Begins). The framing was significant: work carried out by the Armenian Apostolic Church to maintain and repair its own active cathedral was recast as illegitimate interference requiring correction.
What followed was not a technical conservation project but a campaign to reclassify the site itself. Azerbaijani officials and state media began referring to Gandzasar not as an Armenian monastery but as a “Caucasian Albanian temple” — part of a broader argument, long promoted by Baku, that historic Armenian churches on the territory of present-day Azerbaijan actually belonged to a vanished, ethnically distinct Caucasian Albanian church, and that Armenians only arrived in the South Caucasus in the early nineteenth century. Historians note that Caucasian Albania’s church was itself administratively and linguistically absorbed into the Armenian Apostolic Church centuries ago, and that its catholicoi wrote in Armenian — leaving no plausible reason for the site’s medieval inscriptions to exist in any other language (Monument Watch: Expropriation of Gandzasar Begins).
Azerbaijani researcher Rizvan Huseynov went further, publicly claiming that Gandzasar’s Armenian inscriptions were themselves “falsified” or added in later centuries to disguise the monastery’s supposed Albanian origins. Armenian archaeologist Hamlet Petrosyan and the independent monitoring platform Monument Watch rejected this, pointing to an extensive photographic and scholarly record of the inscriptions dating back to the nineteenth century and to Soviet-era academic publications — material produced long before any current dispute existed and therefore impossible to retroactively fabricate (Monument Watch: Further Falsifications Regarding Dadivank and Gandzasar; Wikipedia: Gandzasar Monastery).
This was not a new script. President Ilham Aliyev had already stated in February 2021, after the Second Artsakh War, that Armenian inscriptions on churches now under Azerbaijani control were “forgeries” that would be “restored to their original appearance” — language that Armenian and Western scholars read as a warning of physical alteration or removal, comparable to what had already happened to Armenian inscriptions in Nakhichevan decades earlier (Time: What Cultural Genocide Looks Like for Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh).
Armenia’s permanent representative to UNESCO, Christian Ter-Stepanian, publicly accused Azerbaijan of trying to “appropriate and distort” the identity of one of the best-known medieval Armenian monasteries (Wikipedia: Gandzasar Monastery). Christina Maranci, the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard, wrote in Time that the pattern seen at Gandzasar and the neighboring monastery of Dadivank fit a recognizable sequence: mass expulsion of a population followed by rebranding, reinterpretation, and eventual physical erasure of that population’s monuments (Time, October 2023).
UNESCO itself has expressed general concern about cultural heritage in the territories that changed hands in 2020 and 2023, but — citing restricted access for independent experts — has not produced a site-specific mission report on Gandzasar. Independent satellite monitoring by groups such as Caucasus Heritage Watch has been able to confirm that the monastery’s overall structure remains standing, but by its own account this kind of remote monitoring cannot verify what is happening to inscriptions, khachkars, and interior surfaces at ground level — precisely the elements Armenian scholars say are most at risk. The commentary site commonspace.eu summarized the core problem bluntly in an October 2023 op-ed: Azerbaijan’s language about “Caucasian Albania” is a well-documented feature of its broader “history wars” with Armenia, deployed specifically to argue that Armenians are recent arrivals to the region rather than its indigenous population (commonspace.eu: Opinion on the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage).
In fairness to the full record, Azerbaijan’s state heritage service presents its work very differently. The State Service for the Protection, Development, and Restoration of Cultural Heritage, headed by architecture professor Sabina Hajiyeva, has publicly framed its activity in the former conflict zone as inventorying and repairing monuments — including non-Armenian ones such as mosques and the Azykh Paleolithic cave — that it says were damaged, looted, or misused during the decades of Armenian administration. Hajiyeva has reported that 575 of 749 registered monuments in the “liberated territories” had been inventoried as of 2026, with damages estimated above 700 million manats, and has presented Azerbaijan’s “SECURE” post-conflict heritage model to UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee as a template for other countries (APA: Damage to 434 monuments exceeds AZN 700 million; Azernews: Azerbaijan’s SECURE model presented at UNESCO). Azerbaijani officials describe their work at Gandzasar specifically as correcting decades of unauthorized, unscientific modification by the Armenian side rather than as an attack on the monument.
What neither side disputes is that the two accounts of what is happening inside Gandzasar’s walls right now are irreconcilable, and that verification by disinterested outside experts remains, for the moment, effectively impossible.
Strip away the geography for a moment and the pattern becomes easier to see for what it is.
Florence’s cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, had its first stone laid on 8 September 1296 and was consecrated by Pope Eugene IV on 25 March 1436, once Filippo Brunelleschi’s dome — one of the defining engineering achievements of the early Renaissance — was complete (Opera del Duomo, official site). It has been part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the historic center of Florence, since 1982. It is older than Gandzasar by about eighty years; Gandzasar has simply had less time to accumulate its own body of international protection.
Now imagine that a foreign power seized Florence, expelled its population, and announced that the Duomo’s marble facing would be covered over in modern cladding, its frescoes repainted, its Latin and Italian inscriptions erased, and the building itself reclassified as the heritage of an entirely different people who supposedly lived in Tuscany before the Florentines. The reaction — from Italy, from UNESCO, from the global press — would be immediate and overwhelming. It is difficult to imagine any government attempting it, precisely because Florence has the diplomatic weight, resident population, and institutional protection to make such an attempt costly.
Gandzasar has none of that. Its historic community — the Armenians of Artsakh — no longer live within a hundred kilometers of it. There is no resident population to object in real time, no free press on the ground, and no state with the leverage to compel independent access. The difference between Florence and Gandzasar was never the age or importance of the buildings. It is simply that one still has people to defend it, and the other does not.
Based on a publication by Gayane Movsesyan
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