Silence is complicity: Who will protect the sanctuaries of Artsakh?

For those three “symbols”, they were symbols of the lack of protection of Artsakh’s monuments even before they fell into Azeri hands. The medieval gateway to Dadivank was destroyed and rebuilt new in the months immediately before the 2020 war. This was at the end of multiple years’ worth of destructive heavy-handed “restorations” that had left Dadivank almost devoid of historical integrity. Drone views of Amaras taken during the war revealed stacks of machine-cut paving slabs intended to entirely cover over the grassed (and always grassed) courtyard space, and the original flat earthen roofs of Amaras’s courtyard cells were in the process of being destroyed to be replaced by pitched tiled roofs. The bottom-left corner of your Gandzasar photo shows machine-cut marble stone cladding in the process of being added to cover over 17th century wall surfaces; the top of the same enclosure wall already has a capping of historically inaccurate tiles. Sometime before this, there was the inexplicable destruction of the little pitched-roof mini “chapels” that were perched on top of the north-east and north-west corners of Gandzasar’s 13thC gavit. The one at the NE corner was rebuilt orientated EW rather than the original NE orientation; the one at the NW corner was rebuilt missing the model church that once stood at the apex of its roof.