Advances in heritage forensics pinpoint when Azerbaijan moved from denying to destroying an Armenian church in Shushi

In April 2024, CHW  reported  the destruction of St. John the Baptist Church, a 19 ^th  century Armenian religious center and cultural landmark that had stood in the historic city of Shusha for 177 years.

Using a new method of satellite analysis, CHW has been able to narrow the timing of the destruction from several months to under two weeks.

Precise dating of cultural heritage destruction is crucial: it supports accountability efforts and fact-based journalism, challenges potential misinformation, and creates an accurate historical record of heritage loss. But refining chronologies of impacts is a significant challenge in heritage forensics as a result of both the irregularity of satellite image capture and limits on pixel resolution.

Satellite Analysis

To achieve a more precise date for the church’s destruction, CHW, in collaboration with our partners at  Planet , developed a dual satellite monitoring approach. This method, which CHW first tested in our analysis of the  “Red Cross” Church of Bina/Tumi , entails harnessing the complementary monitoring capabilities of two tiers of satellite imagery.

CHW’s established methodology tasks Planet’s SkySat constellation to provide imagery with high spatial resolution to detect impacts to cultural heritage sites. But these image sets have relatively low temporal resolution, typically with several months elapsing in between captures.

Thus, in the case of the St. John the Baptist Church in Shusha, our initial analysis and  reporting  used Planet’s SkySat imagery in combination with an Airbus image on GoogleEarth to date the destruction event between December 28, 2023, and April 4, 2024, a roughly three-month timespan.

To refine the chronology of the destruction, we added an additional step to our methodology, utilizing the medium resolution of Planet’s PlanetScope platform. PlanetScope offers a much higher temporal resolution thanks to an almost daily revisit rate, depending on location. Despite the lower spatial resolution, our study of the demolition of St. John the Baptist Church demonstrates that a methodology that combines high spatial resolution with high temporal resolution can provide forensic evidence that is both clear enough to establish impacts and delimited enough to define when they took place.

The PlanetScope imagery archive allowed CHW to establish that the destruction of the church in fact took place in a much narrower time frame, between February 14, 2024, and February 27, 2024. The church is clearly visible in the PlanetScope image from February 14, 2024 (below, left), a sizable three-dimensional structure that throws a small shadow to the northwest on a late winter morning. PlanetScope satellites revisited the area seven times over the next two weeks, but the view was obscured by extensive cloud cover.

PlanetScope satellites got their next clear view of Shusha on February 27, 2024 and by that time changes to the site were highly visible, even in the medium resolution image: a medium brown smear now occupies the part of the frame where the church once stood (above, center). No shadow is visible and a heap of disturbed building materials and earth spreads across the site. Examining the site pixel by pixel, it is clear that no element of the former structure remained intact between the two image dates. Two days later, when the PlanetScope satellite revisited again, the erasure of St. John the Baptist Church was complete (above, right). No structure remained, only an empty lot whose color contours—a brown ellipse surrounded by a penumbra of light tan—now resemble the Airbus image showing the structure’s demolition.

St. John the Baptist Church, February 2017

The refined dating afforded by the dual use of both SkySat and PlanetScope imagery lends new significance to the destruction of St. John the Baptist Church. It was precisely during this period, on February 17, 2024, that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev  met  on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. Thus, the destruction of the Armenian church took place amidst the first formal efforts to normalize relations between the two countries since Azerbaijan’s September 2023 military takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Institutional Contradictions: Protection, Restoration, Destruction

Azerbaijan’s official approach to St. John the Baptist Church as a site of both religious and cultural heritage presents a series of baffling contradictions.

Building inscription for St. John the Baptist Church in Shusha (one of two slabs). Photograph courtesy of Monument Watch

Despite clear evidence of its Armenian origins – including building inscriptions from 1847 that name its Armenian builders and purpose – Azerbaijan has denied this affiliation.

Nevertheless, since the late Soviet period, Azerbaijan has accorded the church the status of protected cultural heritage. The building first appeared on the Soviet republic’s official monument registry in 1988 under the the enigmatic name “Maiden Monastery”. This designation was maintained when Azerbaijan updated its monument  registry  in 2001.

A section of Soviet Azerbaijan’s 1988 monument inventory showing St. John the Baptist Church listed, in Russian, as Devichii Monastery, or the Maiden’s Monastery (#2969). Its identity is confirmed by a photograph of the so-called “Maiden Monastery” on an Azerbaijani government  website .

As CHW reported in our  first monitoring report , St. John the Baptist was damaged during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War when Azerbaijani shelling of the city demolished the cupola and damaged the belfry, leaving rubble strewn across the roof. Shusha was ceded to Azerbaijan in the ceasefire agreement brokered by Russia in November 2020. And by the summer of 2021, much of the rubble had been cleared from the building even as a hole in the roof remained where the eastern cupola had once been ( CHW Report #2 ).

In May of 2021, an official from the Russian Orthodox Church’s Baku Diocese further obscured the church’s Armenian identity by  claiming  it as originally theirs and arguing, incorrectly, that Armenian architectural elements were later additions.

Two months later, the Azerbaijan Press Agency  reported  on a joint prayer service held by leaders of several Christian religious communities in Azerbaijan, including the Ordinary of the Roman Catholic Church in Azerbaijan, Bishop Vladimir Fekete, the head of the Albanian Udi religious community, Robert Mobili, and the press secretary of the Baku and Azerbaijan Diocese, Archpriest Konstantin Pominov. The chairman of the Caucasus Muslims Administration, Sheikh-ul-Islam Allahshukur Pashazadeh was also in attendance.

Restoration underway in 2022

In the APA article, photographs of the church showed scaffolding and signage for ‘Construction and Restoration of Historical and Cultural Monuments of Shusha’. In this context of cultural appropriation to Russian religious life in the region, the state’s decision to begin restoration work in 2021 made sense. Restoration was still in process when the BBC captured  footage  of the church in September of that year.

 

It is entirely unclear as to why, less than three years later, the government of Azerbaijan abandoned its program of appropriation and reconstruction to demolish the structure in its entirety.

Moreover, despite its demolition between February 14-27, 2024, St. John the Baptist Church continues to appear on Azerbaijan’s official monument  list  (#5047) and government  websites  as part of Azerbaijan’s cultural heritage – a bureaucratic contradiction that reveals the arbitrary and unpredictable nature of cultural heritage protection for Armenian monuments in Karabakh.

A detailed chronology of these events can be found in the timeline below.

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Timeline

19th century

Sometime before 1847, a wooden church was built on the site, first mentioned in Mesrop Davtian Taghiadian’s travelogue, Journey to Armenia (Taghiadian 1847, 286). In 1847, the limestone church was erected, replacing the earlier wooden structure. Cruciform and elongated in plan, the church had a belfry in the west and a cupola to the east (the cupola was once green, giving the church it’s colloquial Armenian name, Kanach zham, or the Green Church). Further historical and architectural details can be found  here . A building inscription spanning two slabs was placed above the entrance to the belfry. It reads: “Saint John the Baptist church was built by Shushi townsman Mr. Hovhannes and Baba Stepanyan Hovnanents in memory of their deceased brother Mkrtich, in the year of 1847.”

20th Century

At some point during the Soviet era, the church was damaged. Surrounded by sanatoria, the interior was repurposed to serve as a drinking well for mineral water. Additional structural modifications were made to the interior. 1988 – The church was added to Soviet Azerbaijan’s monument list (in the Russian language version of the list, it appears as the Devichii Monastery, or Maiden’s Monastery, #2969). 1995 – In the aftermath of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic began a project to restore the church.

21st Century

2001 – Azerbaijan revised its monument  list , retaining the church under #5047 as Qız monastırı (“Maiden’s Monastery”). Fall 2020. During the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, the church’s belfry and cupola were both damaged, although satellite imagery indicated that the former was still partially extant in February 2021, judging by the shadow cast on a satellite image (CHW Monitoring  Report #1 ). February 14, 2021-April 10, 2021 – Within a few months of the ceasefire, the remains of the belfry had been torn down. May 5, 2021 – Caucasian Knot  reported  that the Baku Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church had claimed that the church was originally an orthodox church, arguing further that: “in the 1990s, it was Armenianized. The domes and bell towers were removed, replacing them with attributes of the Armenian Gregorian Church.” By June 2021, the rubble had been cleared from the roof (CHW Monitoring  Report #2 ). July 10, 2021 – The Azerbaijan Press Agency  reported  on a joint prayer service at the church and published photographs that show the church under restoration. The sign on the scaffolding read “Construction and Restoration of Historical and Cultural Monuments of Shusha.” September 24, 2021 – A BBC  video  showed that restoration was still planned or underway (see minute 10:36). April 18, 2024 – CHW  reported  the destruction of the church on social media June 2024 – CHW reported on the destruction in  Monitoring Report #7 . March 2026 – The church is still listed on Azerbaijan’s official monument  list  as #5047 and on governmental  websites , despite the state’s decision to demolish it.