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A deminer’s archive: Ancient artifacts found in the minefields of Artsakh
For a deminer, an object found in the ground usually represents a lethal threat. For David Simonyan, however, the soil of Artsakh kept more than the dangers left from war.
Simonyan is a former HALO Trust worker, whose career in humanitarian demining began in 2003. Following the first Nagorno-Karabakh war in the 1990s, the soil was heavily contaminated with unexploded ordnance and landmines. Simonyan describes the density of these explosives as being like "sunflower seeds," scattered thickly
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I applaud David Simonyan for his courage and for saving even a small part of Artsakh’s tangible history from disappearing and being forgotten.
The vast majority of Artsakh’s tangible cultural heritage, whether Armenian or prehistoric, is being destroyed, and artifacts such as these are being appropriated by Azerbaijan as “Caucasian Albanian,” in a futile attempt to deny that Armenians ever lived there and to create a fabricated history, which Azerbaijan is of course infamous for.
Sadly this also shows that warfare and contest over lands Arktash and elsewhere… is nothing new, long before the arrival of Turanian tribes and the pro Turkic Bolshevik courting and appeasement of Islamic peoples in the short lasting red ( Communists) – green (Muslims) alliance of which the Armenians lost territory as a result of the nefarious schemes, which served to aggravate existing animosities and their arrogant and tragic presumption that socialism would overcome racial and religious differences as the people in their utopia would be united in class struggle for an equitable future instead.
jucial and religious differences as the people in their utopia would be united in class struggle for an equitable future instead.nip
well