BAKU, Azerbaijan, May 24. Media outlets in Armenia and Italy continue to react to the international conference titled "Christianity in Azerbaijan: History and Modernity", which took place at the Pontifical Gregorian University of the Holy See in Vatican City on April 10.
A particular point of controversy has been the remarks made by political analyst Fuad Akhundov, who described Armenia as an "anti-Christian state" during his speech.
The Armenian media platform CivilNet published an article titled "Azerbaijan uses Vatican venue to rewrite Armenian history", asserting that the tone of the conference was encapsulated in Akhundov’s statement: “Armenia increasingly demonstrates characteristics that are not Christian but rather anti-Christian.” However, the outlet omitted the arguments behind this conclusion and failed to clarify that Akhundov’s remarks were directed at the state, its policies, institutions, and leadership — not the Armenian people.
In response, Akhundov wrote an open letter to CivilNet, which the outlet did not publish. Nevertheless, he emphasized that he would find alternative ways to make his views known to the Armenian public, stating that the editorial stance of CivilNet reflects a continued effort to keep the Armenian population uninformed about their own history.
Back in Soviet times, there was a well-known joke: “Pounds sterling are just very bad rubles.” The humor lay in the ignorance it revealed — people didn’t really understand what pounds sterling were, so they assumed they were merely a subpar version of their currency. Today, the accusations leveled by the Armenian outlet CivilNet against political scientist Fuad Akhundov seem to echo that same logic, steeped in the spirit of Soviet-style propaganda: “Fuad Akhundov said some very bad things — and you Armenians don’t need to know what they were.” We turned to Fuad Akhundov himself for clarification, asking him to summarize the key points he made at a conference held at the Vatican University, where he explained why he considers Armenia to be an anti-Christian state.
– According to official statistics, nearly 95 percent of Armenia’s population identifies as Christian. So why do you describe Armenia as an anti-Christian country?
– There’s no question that the majority of Armenia’s population adheres to Christianity — not Islam, which, notably, had been the dominant religion across these lands for centuries until the mass resettlement of Armenians in the early 19th century to what was then the Irevan khanate, essentially a vast Muslim cemetery. But the real question is this: to what extent do the policies and guiding principles of modern Armenia actually reflect Christian teachings? Let’s take, for instance, the commandment “Thou shalt not bear false witness” — in other words, "Thou shalt not lie.”
It’s astonishing, but Armenians once managed to mislead even Pope John Paul II. While visiting Yerevan, and likely prompted by Armenia’s presidential protocol service, the Pope publicly referred to Mount Ararat as “the biblical mountain” where Noah’s Ark came to rest after the Great Flood. Naturally, this should have been vetted for historical and scientific accuracy by the Vatican’s own protocol service. To set the record straight, I reached out to scholars at the Pontifical Gregorian University of the Holy See, requesting a formal academic position on the matter, precisely to prevent such factual missteps in the future. The claim itself — that Ararat is the Ark’s resting place — is a myth largely propagated within Armenian discourse. There is ample scientific research contradicting it. One example comes from none other than Mikhail Piotrovsky, a highly respected scholar even in Armenia, who, amused by the implausibility of the claim, suggested that the search for Noah’s Ark would be better directed toward the Corduene Mountains — a range located south of Lake Van, in what is today the Hakkari and Şırnak provinces of Türkiye, and situated hundreds of kilometers away from Mount Ağrı (Ararat).
I began my presentation by reminding everyone of Christianity’s original and universalist message — that it was never intended as the faith of a single chosen people. Consider the words of the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Colossians, residents of the city of Colossae: “Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.” (Colossians 3:11)
In other words, the New Testament does not promote the idea of a singular ethnic group chosen by God. Instead, it calls for the spread of faith beyond borders and ethnic divisions — uniting people around a shared spiritual principle.
- And what is happening today in the Republic of Armenia?
- In modern-day Armenia, monoethnicity is not only a fact — it is a point of national pride. The country openly celebrates the expulsion of its last Azerbaijani residents at the end of the 20th century. There exists a recorded video from 1993 showing Armenia’s first president, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, congratulating armed militants on the capture of the Azerbaijani city of Aghdam — a city that, it must be emphasized, never had a significant Armenian population. In that same speech, he declares that the “cleansing” of Armenia’s territory from Azerbaijanis represented, in his words, “the age-old dream of the Armenian people.” With such a statement, he effectively endorses and glorifies ethnic cleansing.
And here we must pause and ask: how can such a claim — that the removal of an entire ethnic group fulfills a “dream” — be uttered in the 21st century? More importantly, how does such rhetoric align with the values of Christian compassion, mercy, and universal dignity?
Let me also recall a piece of history that may be inconvenient for some to acknowledge. There were indeed Armenian states in antiquity — but not on the territory where the modern Republic of Armenia stands today. One of the visuals I presented during the Vatican University conference was a painting on the ceiling of a historic Vatican building, which clearly shows the ancient Armenian realm situated far from Yerevan and the South Caucasus.
The mass settlement of Armenians in the lands that today comprise Armenia — a state officially formed in May 1918 — began only after the signing of the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828. It was this treaty that triggered the resettlement of ethnic Armenians from the Qajar Iran dynasty and the Ottoman Empire into the Azerbaijani territories — described in the treaty itself as “the best lands of Erivan, Nakhchivan, and Karabakh.”
Historical documents confirm this process. For instance, on March 30, 1828, Colonel L. Lazarev, nephew of General Ivan Lazarev and an ardent supporter of the “Armenian question,” issued a proclamation in Urmia inviting Armenians under Persian rule to migrate to newly conquered Azerbaijani lands of the Russian Empire. This is recorded in the 1831 publication by S. Glinka, Description of the Resettlement of Armenians from Adirbidjan into the Borders of Russia (pp. 108, 114).
Even the renowned Russian diplomat and playwright Alexander Griboyedov, who was directly involved in managing these resettlements, acknowledged the tension in his writings. He described how the Armenian settlers were displacing the Muslim population, writing: “The settlers themselves are pressed for space and are pushing out the Muslims, who are all grumbling — and seriously so.”
We might add that it wasn’t only Muslims who expressed discontent. The remaining Christian communities — particularly the descendants of the ancient Caucasian Albanians — also faced displacement and erasure. This process intensified following the imperial decree issued by Tsar Nicholas I on March 11, 1836, which officially transferred the properties and parishes of the independent Albanian Apostolic Church to the Armenian Gregorian Church.
According to Griboyedov, the so-called "quiet ethnic cleansing" of the indigenous Muslim population of Erivan and Karabakh began immediately after the Armenian resettlement of 1828. This process, though initially subtle, gradually evolved into outright violence and culminated in acts of genocide: first during 1918–1920, then in 1988 on the ancestral lands of Azerbaijan, and in between — under Stalin's decrees between 1948–1953, which mandated the mass deportation of Azerbaijanis from the Armenian SSR to the Azerbaijan SSR.
The magnitude of these crimes is corroborated by none other than the prominent Armenian historian Zaven Korkodyan. According to his data, during just two years of Dashnak rule (1918–1920), 130,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and another 240,000 were forcibly expelled. In 1916, 373,582 Azerbaijanis were living within what would become Armenia. By 1920, only 10,000 remained. That means approximately 99 percent of the Azerbaijani population was annihilated or exiled — an unfathomable demographic purge. These figures are taken from Korkodyan’s work, "The Population of Soviet Armenia, 1831–1931" (Yerevan, 1932, p. 186).
And it wasn’t only Korkodyan. Soviet Armenian historian and journalist Anait Lalayan also exposed these atrocities. In her article, "The Counter-Revolutionary Dashnaktsutyun and the Imperialist War of 1914–1918", she detailed how Armenian nationalist militias committed large-scale massacres of Azerbaijanis during the short-lived Ararat Republic. Her work, included in Historical Notes (Vol. 2, 1938, pp. 100–104), published by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, offers undeniable evidence of ethnic cleansing under the guise of nationalism.
Over a span of 160 years — from 1828 to 1988 — the Azerbaijani population in these territories was systematically driven out, massacred, or deported. By the close of the 20th century, Armenia had transformed into a monoethnic state. Such policies of exclusion, elimination, and demographic engineering are not only reminiscent of the medieval mentality — they are profoundly anti-Christian in nature.
– And alongside the population, Armenia erased the Azerbaijani cultural and architectural heritage, correct?
– Precisely. Along with the people, their history was also obliterated — quite literally. Today’s Armenia has no trace of its authentic architectural past because that past was Azerbaijani. Cities like Yerevan lost their historical cores. As architecture is often called “frozen music,” it is also “frozen history” — and in Armenia’s case, that history was buried under bulldozers.
Take, for instance, the painting “The Capture of the Erivan Fortress” by the renowned battle artist Franz Roubaud, known for his precise historical depictions. The artwork shows the historic heart of what is now Yerevan — a magnificent medieval Azerbaijani fortress, home to 850 houses. That entire architectural legacy has been razed, replaced with a completely different aesthetic that bears no relation to what stood there for centuries.
Thus, we are dealing with not just demographic but cultural and historical cleansing. First, the Azerbaijani population was expelled or destroyed. Second, the architectural identity of Armenia was transformed from medieval Azerbaijani to modern Armenian. Third, the toponymic landscape was rewritten — names of cities, villages, rivers, lakes, and mountains were systematically changed. Some were translated into Armenian; others were replaced with names imported from unrelated regions, like the Armenian toponyms of the Euphrates basin. It reached such an absurd point that Armenian officials lodged formal protests when Azerbaijani (i.e., historically accurate) place names appeared in educational textbooks — an astonishing display of anti-Azerbaijani hysteria and an utter rejection of the values of tolerance and coexistence.
Fourth — and this too must be acknowledged — many of the ancient Albanian Christian churches that once stood on these lands were appropriated and “Armenized.” This deliberate falsification of religious heritage is, again, entirely at odds with Christian ethics.
I am not aware of another country in the modern world that has so thoroughly and systematically altered its architectural, toponymic, and demographic identity in order to erase all traces of another culture. In Armenia’s case, this transformation—from Azerbaijani to Armenian—has turned the country into a kind of open-air museum of cultural vandalism.
To truly grasp the scale of the cultural catastrophe endured by the Azerbaijani people—a tragedy not only of regional but of universal significance—let us imagine a symmetrical, hypothetical scenario.
Suppose that in the early 19th century, the Italian Peninsula was occupied by a foreign Muslim power, and a wave of Azerbaijani settlers was relocated there. A campaign of genocide follows: the entire indigenous Christian population is either massacred or expelled. Italy’s historic cultural identity is systematically dismantled. Then, by 1965, the magnificent Italian architectural heritage was brought under the blade of bulldozers.
Only one church is left standing in Rome—mirroring the fate of the solitary surviving mosque in Yerevan—while the rest of Italy’s religious and historic landmarks are obliterated. In this imagined reality, the Colosseum is replaced by the Sardar Palace, Milan Cathedral by the Bibi-Heybat Mosque, the Leaning Tower of Pisa by the Momine Khatun Mausoleum, and the Basilica of St. Mark by the Palace of the Sheki Khans. In the sacred Valley of the Temples in Agrigento, now rises the Palace of the Shirvanshahs.
The toponymy is also completely altered. Rome becomes Irevan. Milan is renamed Basarkechar. Pompeii is now called Sardarabad. Pisa becomes Khakhamli. Venice is renamed—again—as Sardarabad. Bari is now Jalaloglu. The site of Agrigento takes on the name of Istisu. Lake Como becomes Goycha, and the Tiber River is renamed Zangi.
Can you imagine such a sweeping, ruthless replacement of one civilization with another? This analogy, while hypothetical, reflects the very real and tragic fate that befell Azerbaijani heritage and identity in Armenia.
- And then Armenia repeated the same pattern in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan.
Exactly. The strategy employed in Armenia was replicated in the Azerbaijani territories occupied by Armenian forces during the First Karabakh War. First, the Azerbaijani civilian population was forcibly expelled or killed. Second, cultural and religious sites were systematically destroyed: for instance, 64 of the 67 mosques in the occupied areas were either desecrated or entirely demolished. Third, toponyms and hydronyms were altered en masse to fit Armenian linguistic and cultural narratives. And fourth, ancient Christian monuments belonging to the Caucasian Albanian Church were appropriated and rebranded as Armenian heritage.
Notably, when Islam first reached the Caucasus, it coexisted with pre-existing Christian communities. Ancient Albanian churches were left intact, often standing peacefully beside newly built mosques. Islam did not eliminate Christianity; it spread among pagans, while Christian Albanians remained Christian. It was later, under Armenian ecclesiastical influence, that these Albanian communities were gradually absorbed into the Armenian Church—and with them, their religious sites. Unlike Islam’s approach of coexistence, the Armenian approach in both Armenia and the occupied Azerbaijani territories was one of destruction, appropriation, and replacement.
By the end of the 20th century, around 750,000 Azerbaijanis were forcibly displaced from Karabakh and the eastern part of Zangezur—what is today referred to as Lower Zangezur—turning them into internally displaced persons (IDPs). During the military operations of the early 1990s, multiple episodes of mass atrocities and war crimes were committed against Azerbaijani civilians: in Malibeyli, Meshali, Balligaya, and, most notoriously, Khojaly, where one of the worst massacres of the post-Soviet era took place.
Entire towns and villages in Karabakh were subjected to looting, arson, desecration, and urbicide—the deliberate destruction of urban spaces and identity. Can such acts be reconciled with the principles of Christianity, whose core teachings speak of compassion, mercy, and respect for human dignity?
- Armenia is also engaged in the glorification and promotion of Nazism. You likely addressed this in your speech as well?
– Yes, I did. It is well known that in central Yerevan, right in the government quarter, there stands a monument to Garegin Nzhdeh—the founder of the ultranationalist and fascist ideology known as Tseghakron. While Christianity calls on believers to transcend ethnic and national boundaries, “Nzhdehism” is rooted in racial exclusivity and claims of Armenian ethnic superiority. The very term Tseghakron translates roughly as “race religion” or “race-centered belief,” and it is no exaggeration to say it carries the connotation of racial ideology. This worldview has, at various points, functioned as state ideology in Armenia—particularly during the presidencies of Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan.
Kocharyan himself publicly asserted the so-called “genetic incompatibility” between Armenians and Azerbaijanis—a chilling echo of fascist rhetoric. A few years later, his wife, Bella Kocharyan, attended the inauguration of a blood bank in Yerevan and proudly proclaimed that it would store exclusively “pure Armenian blood.” Can anything be more antithetical to the Christian doctrine of universal human equality?
But it doesn’t end there. One must also consider a deeper and more disturbing issue. One of the key civilizational missions of the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—was the rejection of human sacrifice. This rejection became a fundamental moral and spiritual boundary. Yet even in this regard, we encounter troubling realities in Armenia. The traditional ritual known as matakh—though now broadly associated with animal sacrifice—retains disturbing traces of pre-Christian practices, which in some radicalized instances have reportedly crossed a deeply troubling line.
- Human sacrifices? Can that really be true?
– Unfortunately, there are credible testimonies. For example, in 2005, the book My Brother’s Road: An American’s Fateful Journey to Armenia by Markar Melkonian—the brother of the militant leader Monte Melkonian—was published. However, the Armenian edition of this book censored certain passages that revealed inconvenient truths. Among those were eyewitness accounts of the brutal atrocities committed by Armenian militants against Azerbaijani civilians in Khojaly. Melkonian wrote in stark terms about the cruelty inflicted on the peaceful population—descriptions that contradict the official Armenian narrative that blames Azerbaijanis themselves for the Khojaly tragedy (Markar Melkonian, "My Brother’s Road", I.B. Tauris, pp. 210, 213, 214).
Yet, disturbingly, one horrifying episode remained in the Armenian edition. It recounts how, in November 1990, in one of the border villages, Armenian militants kidnapped a young Azerbaijani activist from the Popular Front named Said. He was chained in a cottage near Yerevan for a while, and then—according to Melkonian’s account—his throat was slit and his blood drained onto a grave in the Yerablur military cemetery (p. 215). Armenian publishers, astonishingly, did not see fit to remove this account. The act was not only allowed in print—it was seemingly normalized. According to further documented reports, similar sacrificial killings occurred again. In February 1992, in the village of Garadaghly, four Azerbaijani prisoners were subjected to what appeared to be ritualistic execution by Armenian militants—again, under the guise of matakh. These acts are a direct contradiction of Christian values and exemplify a disturbing return to pre-Christian, pagan practices.
And indeed, this is far from an isolated incident. I recall a striking excerpt from an appeal by Soviet Army servicemen and their families stationed in Armenia during the First Karabakh War, published in the newspaper Zavtra. It asked, “How can a people who consider themselves Christian allow Azerbaijani prisoners of war to have their heads cut off on the graves of Armenian soldiers?” In short, the medieval brutality exhibited by some Armenians starkly contradicted the values of humanity—values the so-called “oppressed Armenians” themselves repeatedly violated.
The shocking criminal case of 2017 further underscores this grim reality. At the foot of the iconic Mother Armenia monument in Yerevan, Russian serviceman Dmitry Yalpayev was found with his throat slit—a scene eerily reminiscent of another human matakh ritual. Just the day before, another Russian serviceman, Loshmanov, had gone missing in Gyumri and was later found in the apartment of a local stripper. During the search for Loshmanov, disturbing rumors emerged: that he was to be kidnapped and “sacrificed” in retaliation for the murder of the Avetisyan family—an atrocity committed by another Russian soldier, Permyakov. Naturally, the Armenian investigative authorities sought to downplay any connection to sacrificial practices in Yalpayev’s murder. They even proposed a sensational and unlikely theory that the killer had converted to Islam in Greece—though there are no Muslim communities in Armenia itself.
In a similar vein, a scandal shook Armenia in May 2023 when there was an attempted kidnapping of 23-year-old Ashot Pashinyan, son of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Persistent rumors circulated that this too was part of a planned ritual sacrifice, allegedly plotted over several years. The target was said to be the Yerablur cemetery, a site previously associated with the stabbing of captured Azerbaijanis in similar ritualistic ways. Armenian blogger Alina Makhsudyan spoke in detail about these chilling allegations.
- So, should such acts of human sacrifice be considered “Christian”?
These are urgent questions for the Armenian public, the church, the government, and the nation as a whole. Armenian leaders must clearly define their civilizational values—and stop attempting to reconcile the worship of the Cross with barbaric human sacrifices. Without this reckoning, it will remain impossible to shed the deeply troubling image of Armenia as the “Country of the Antichrist.”
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