Azernews.Az

By Rashid Shirinov

This spring, the Armenian side has announced about launch of excavations on the territory of the Azerbaijani mosque Govhar Agha, located in Shusha city in the Armenia-occupied Nagorno-Karabakh.

Twenty five years ago, the Armenian armed forces occupied Shusha, killing and disabling hundreds of innocent Azerbaijani civilians, expelling the entire population of the town, and destroying, burning down, and looting numerous monuments belonging to the Azerbaijani culture and history. After the occupation of Azerbaijani lands, the invaders started a policy of falsifying the real history of Azerbaijan's Nagorno-Karabakh, trying to present the remaining monuments as Armenian.

Armenians, from time to time, conduct illegal investigations for scientific ‘justification’ of groundless claims to Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region. An interesting point is that Armenians name the Govhar Agha mosque as ‘Persian’ in order to conceal that it is part of the rich Azerbaijani heritage in the country’s occupied lands.

Predictably, Armenian archeologists have recently revealed the first ‘findings.’ Armenian media state that these are some early Christian burial sites allegedly discovered inside the mosque.

Head of the Caucasus History Center, Rizvan Huseynov is sure that this alleged finding is nothing more than another Armenian lie.

“The Govhar Agha mosque is almost four-century old, and no source ever mentioned that it was built on any Christian tombs. There were held numerous restoration works during the Soviet period, but no graves were found,” he said.

Huseynov reminded that Shusha was founded and built by Azerbaijanis, but now the Armenian side in order to justify its claims to the Azerbaijani lands comes up with ‘facts’ and as always falsifies the history.

“As always, there are only talks – no evidence was provided about the burial, there are no photos which could confirm this,” said Huseynov,stressing that this suggests that the Armenian side, as usual, invents its own history.

Construction of the Azerbaijani mosque of Govhar Agha began on order of Ibrahim Khan in 1768 and was completed in 1885. The architecture of the mosque corresponds to the Karabakh style, which is also evidenced from Azerbaijan’s Agdam mosque, a mosque in Barda city, Ashaghi Govhar Agha mosque in Fuzuli, as well as the Juma and Horadiz mosques.

As a result of hostilities in early 1990s during the Nagorno-Karabakh war and vandalism of Armenian occupiers, the mosque was damaged. A few years ago, the occupation regime announced the start of its restoration, pre-declaring this Azerbaijani mosque as ‘Persian.’

The Govhar Agha mosque isn't the only historical monument of Azerbaijan that became the victim of Armenian vandalism. The occupiers constantly come up with new fake stories regarding Azerbaijani monuments in the occupied lands in an attempt to misappropriate the history of Azerbaijan.

Today, Armenians continue their efforts to deceive the international community with fabricated history and illegal excavation.

The only way to stop this injustice is the withdrawal of Armenian troops from Azerbaijan's Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions and the return of these occupied territories to Azerbaijan, as it is required in four UN Security Council resolutions of 1993.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

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