Trampling Through the Centuries: How Baku-Accredited Diplomats “Toured” Gandzasar

On September 11–12, 2026, around 150 diplomats from 58 countries accredited in Baku took part in an organized tour of the territories of the former Nagorno-Karabakh Republic — Khankendi (Stepanakert), Shusha, Aghdara (Martakert), Kalbajar. The second day’s itinerary included the Gandzasar monastery complex — the ancestral burial site of the Hasan-Jalalyan princes and one of the principal spiritual centers of historical Artsakh. The visit itself and its route are confirmed by several Azerbaijani outlets that covered the trip day by day (Trend.az) (APA.az) (Vesti.az) (Day.Az).

In the footage and photographs released after the visit, diplomats in formal suits are seen standing and crouching directly on carved stone slabs — tombstones and architectural fragments of the church bearing Armenian ornamentation: crosses, rosettes, and vegetal motifs characteristic of 13th-century khachkar art. To anyone familiar with the tradition of medieval Armenian necropolises, it is unmistakable: beneath the guests’ feet are not decorative flagstones, but the funerary and facing stones of a family mausoleum.

Whose grave is being trampled: Prince Hasan-Jalal Vahtangian

Gandzasar was not built as an abstract “regional monument” but as the family church of a specific dynasty. Its patron was Hasan-Jalal Dola Vahtangian, of the House of Syunik (d. 1261), who inherited power in Khachen (historical Artsakh) in 1214.

• Father — Vahtang II Tangik of Syunik, son of Hasan of Syunik and Mamkan Zakarian.
• Mother — Khorishah, daughter of Sargis II Zakarian, a prince of the Zakarid house that ruled Eastern Armenia as vassals of the Georgian Bagrationi dynasty — itself a junior branch of the Armenian royal Bagratuni dynasty.
• Brothers — Ivane and Zakare of Syunik.

Through his mother, Hasan-Jalal was a grandson of the founder of the Zakarid line, and through this lineage he brought Khachen-Artsakh into the orbit of the unified Armenian principality of the Zakarids. He held the titles “ter of Khachen” (“lord of Khachen”), “ishkhan of Khachen” (“prince of Khachen”), and “mets ishkhan Khachenoy ev koghmants Artsakhoy” (“great prince of Khachen and the regions of Artsakh”) — all recorded in Classical Armenian (Grabar).

Construction of the cathedral ran from 1216 to 1238; the pink volcanic tuff for it was brought from Ani, the then-capital of the Armenian kingdom, seat of Hasan-Jalal’s Zakarid relatives. The church itself was built on the site of an earlier, 10th-century structure erected under the Bagratuni royal dynasty, with whom the patron also had blood ties.

A building inscription by the prince himself survives on the cathedral wall — in Armenian, written in the first person:

In the name of the Holy Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — I, servant of God, Jalal Dola, son of Vahtang, grandson of the great Hasan, king of Khokhanaberd with its broad provinces… My father Vahtang, before his death, bequeathed to me and to my mother Khorishah [the task of] building a church and a burial ground for our forefathers at Gandzasar…

And further, in the prince’s full title inscribed on the temple walls:

I, the humble servant of God, Hasan Jalal, son of Vahtang, grandson of the great Hasan, lawful sovereign ruler of the lofty and great land of Artsakh, possessing broad borders.

This inscription — like thousands of others on the temple walls and on the tombstones surrounding it — is written exclusively in Grabar, Classical Armenian ecclesiastical language. There is no alternative epigraphy on these stones, nor has there ever been.

Hasan-Jalal became the founder of the Hasan-Jalalyan princely dynasty, and Gandzasar remained their family mausoleum for seven centuries thereafter. It was from here, in 1701, that representatives of the Armenian clergy and nobility sent a petition to Peter I requesting help in liberating Armenia. The Hasan-Jalalyan family lived in the adjoining village of Vank until September 2023: as of that time, the village had 85 residents bearing the surname Hasan-Jalalyan — all of whom became refugees. One of the family’s most prominent descendants through the maternal line was the businessman Levon Hayrapetyan, who financed the monastery’s restoration in the 2000s.

What happened to the monastery after 2023

Since September 2023, when Nagorno-Karabakh came under Azerbaijani control and nearly all of its Armenian population left the region, Gandzasar has been caught up in what is officially called “restoration” but what Armenian historians and organizations documenting Artsakh’s cultural heritage describe as a campaign of de-Armenianization. The Monument Watch monitoring initiative (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia) records that following “the final de-Armenianization of Artsakh as a result of the military actions of September 19–20, 2023,” Azerbaijani claims that Armenian inscriptions and khachkars are “forgeries” began to see practical application — that is, to translate into the physical removal of epigraphy on monuments across the region (Monument Watch).

The Azerbaijani outlet Minval Politika, which covered the diplomats’ visit, itself acknowledges interference with the monument’s appearance, though it frames this differently: in its own words, Gandzasar is a “13th-century monument, one of the religious and cultural centers of Caucasian Albania,” which, during “the years of occupation,” underwent “illegal interventions,” with its architectural appearance altered (Minval Politika). Tellingly, “occupation” here refers to the decades during which the monastery was under the care of the Armenian Church and was restored by the Armenian community — not to the period since 2023.

Attempts to present Gandzasar as a monument of “Caucasian Albania” rather than Armenian architecture are nothing new. As far back as the Soviet period, the Leningrad medievalist Anatoly Yakobson analyzed and refuted such constructions by Azerbaijani authors in detail, pointing to distorted citations and “false” attributions in their work on Gandzasar and khachkars — his analysis of a report by D. A. and M. D. Akhundov on the “cult symbolism” of Albanian temples and stelae concluded that the interpretations they proposed distorted the meaning, artistic content, and origin of medieval Armenian decorative art (more). Today, that same scheme — “Albanian,” and therefore “not Armenian” — is applied not in scholarly polemics but as a pretext for physically dismantling inscriptions on standing monuments.

What the visit’s photographs show

In the footage circulated after the diplomatic corps’ trip, visitors to the monastery are shown standing and crouching on slabs carved with rosettes and crosses — motifs typical specifically of medieval Armenian stone carving (similar motifs appear on khachkars throughout historical Artsakh and Syunik). Official Azerbaijani reports on the visit confine themselves to generic phrases about “a complex consisting of a church, an entrance hall, and auxiliary buildings,” and about the history recounted to the guests on site (Vesti.az) — without mentioning whose graves these are or by what artistic canon the carvings beneath the delegation’s feet were made.

For the Armenian side, the symbolism is unambiguous: representatives of the diplomatic missions of more than fifty states are literally walking across the tombstones of a family whose centuries-long history — from Hasan-Jalal in the 13th century to the last residents of Vank village, displaced in 2023 — is continuously tied to this temple, and they are doing so as part of a tour organized by the very side that independent researchers accuse of erasing Armenian epigraphy from this same monument.

Sources

• Trend.az — itinerary for the diplomatic corps’ second day
• APA.az — photo report from the Gandzasar visit
• Vesti.az — diplomats told about the monastery’s history
• Day.Az — itinerary for the Kalbajar and Aghdara trip
• Minval Politika — “illegal interventions” in Gandzasar’s appearance
• Monument Watch (NAS Armenia) — de-Armenianization of Artsakh’s monuments after 2023
• Wikipedia (Russian) — “Falsification of History in Azerbaijan” (Yakobson’s analysis)
• Monument Watch — the modern khachkar of Gandzasar, erected for the 20th anniversary of the Artsakh diocese

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