Destruction of the Armenian cemetery in Julfa

The Armenian cemetery in Julfa (Jugha), located in the Nakhchivan exclave of Azerbaijan, was one of the largest medieval Armenian burial grounds, historically containing around 10,000 funerary monuments, primarily khachkars — intricately carved cross-stones — along with ram-shaped tombstones. French traveler Alexandre de Rhodes recorded roughly 10,000 well-preserved khachkars at the site in 1648, though by 1903–1904 only about 5,000 remained standing. The cemetery survived largely intact through the late 1990s.

Following the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, which concluded with a 1994 ceasefire and the establishment of the de facto independent Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Armenia raised formal allegations in 1998 that Azerbaijan was destroying khachkars at Julfa, after Arpiar Petrosyan of Armenian Architecture in Iran filmed bulldozers demolishing monuments. Azerbaijani officials, including Nakhchivan representative Hasan Zeynalov, dismissed the claims as fabrications. International scrutiny at the time reportedly slowed the destruction, according to Armenia's Minister of Culture. By 1998, the broader number of Armenian monuments in the Nakhchivan region had reportedly fallen sharply from earlier counts.

Armenians renewed protests in 2003, alleging the destruction had resumed. In December 2005, the Armenian Bishop of Tabriz and other Iranian Armenians documented video evidence from across the Aras River purportedly showing Azerbaijani troops completing destruction of remaining khachkars using sledgehammers and axes. In 2006, an Institute for War and Peace Reporting journalist who visited the area found no visible remains of the cemetery, and photographs taken from Iran showed the site had reportedly become a military shooting range.

UNESCO and the International Council on Monuments and Sites called for the destruction to cease after the 1998 allegations. In 2006, Azerbaijan barred European Parliament members from inspecting the site, prompting criticism from MEPs including Hannes Swoboda and Charles Tannock, who compared the destruction to the Taliban's demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas. A planned 2007 Council of Europe inspection was canceled after a dispute over travel routes into Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan has consistently denied the allegations; President Ilham Aliyev called them "a lie and a provocation," and Azerbaijani officials argued the monuments were of Caucasian Albanian, not Armenian, origin.

In December 2010, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, comparing satellite imagery from 2003 and 2009, concluded that "significant destruction and changes in the grade of the terrain" had occurred and that the cemetery area was "likely destroyed and later leveled by earth-moving equipment." In April 2011, U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan Matthew Bryza was denied access to the Julfa site during a visit to Nakhchivan. The destruction has been described by Armenian and some non-Armenian sources as an act of cultural genocide, and has prompted ongoing digital reconstruction efforts, including the Australian Catholic University's Julfa Project launched in 2013.