Your trusted source

Vandals attacked an Orthodox cemetery in Sabunchi settlement in the Azerbaijani capital on 5 June at night. A double sacrilege took place. This time, along with the headstones of Baku’s average Christian residents, “the tombstones on the mass graves were destroyed,” too, according to a letter sent to the editorial office of the analytical portal Voskanapat.info.

According to the information, the pompous building of SOCAR (State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic) stands by the subway station Ulsuz near the Sabunchi cemetery. According to the report, the correspondent of the Azerbaijani outlet Median.az writes, “There is an impression that we arrived at a rare wilderness on the offsets of Azerbaijan. The narrow, jolty and dusty country roads, often ending in deadlocks, are practically deserted because of intense heat and dust.”

The author reminds that the largest Christian cemetery in Baku that used to be in Baku center, the Narimani cemetery or ‘Montino’, as people call it, was utterly destroyed a few years ago. Today, apartment buildings are constructed on the place of Narimani cemetery.

The Azerbaijani correspondent writes that the mass graves in the abandoned Sabunchi cemetery are placed in a territory made as a memory park. The remains of the soldiers who died of wounds in Baku hospitals are buried here. The police officers on duty there said that the tombstones - 20 in total - had been broken and taken out of the territory of the mass graves on June 5 at night. When asked who could have done that, they said, “Possibly those who are interested in that stone.”

In early November 2013, the whole Russian-language segment in the Internet was shocked by the Azerbaijanis’ act of vandalism. A road to the Baksol area in the settlement Rasulzade in the Azerbaijani capital Baku turned out to be constructed of tombstones and headstones taken out from the biggest Russian-Armenian Christian cemetery in the republic, ‘Montino’, which had been completely destroyed with bulldozers. As the stones were not meant to be resold, the epitaphs and portraits of the dead were left on them.

In 2014, Azerbaijani news portal Minval.az received a letter from Baku Khazar district residents who wrote about the awful plight of the Orthodox cemetery in Bina settlement. According to the letter, the cemetery looked more than depressing; the locals had practically turned it into a garbage dump. They used the cemetery as a grazing pasture for cattle and small livestock.