Azerbaijan completely destroyed Artsakh’s Sargsashen village

Azerbaijan has almost completely destroyed the village of Sargsashen in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) as part of its state-sponsored policy to eraze all Armenian traces there, warns Hovik Avanesov, Cultural Ombudsman of the Armenian Highlands.

In a post on Facebook on Monday, Avanesov reported that the deliberate destruction of depopulated Armenian towns and villages is intensifying, carried out with heavy construction and military equipment.

“The latest victim of this strategy is the village of Sargsashen in the Martuni region,” he wrote. “While the village had already suffered significant damage between 2021 and 2024 following its occupation by the Turkish-Azerbaijani alliance during the 2020 war, satellite images from 2025 now reveal the complete and systematic erasure of the entire village. Its homes, streets, and historical layers have been almost completely reduced to rubble.”

Sargsashen before the 2020 war

Avanesov emphasized that Sargsashen is not an isolated case, but part of a wider policy of cultural eradication being carried out across Artsakh. He warned that dozens of other Armenian towns and villages have been similarly targeted, either partially or entirely destroyed, in an attempt to eliminate the cultural, historical and civilizational heritage of the Armenian people.

The other affected sites include the heroic village of Karin Tak in the Shushi region, as well as Mokhrenes, Mariamadzor, Tsamdzor and Taghut-Taghot in the Hadrut region, as well as the community of Arakel, including its Dzoragyugh settlement.

“There is no longer any room for doubt,” Avanesov stressed. “What is unfolding in Artsakh is one of the large-scale acts of cultural genocide not only in the 21st century, but in human history. This is not about the collateral damage of war, it is a deliberate, coordinated and systematic campaign of cultural and civilizational annihilation.”

He called on the international community to condemn Azerbaijan’s actions as gross violations of international law.