Azerbaijan Mocks Armenian Manuscript With Blank Pages

During a large diplomatic tour of occupied Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh), presidential advisor Hikmet Hajiyev pointed to a display replica of an Armenian manuscript, flipped through its blank pages, and told the assembled foreign diplomats that this represented Armenian history: empty. The hosts describe the moment as one of the most disgusting they have covered, not only for the insult but for the audience. European diplomats, they say, watched with smiles and even giggled at his jokes.

Hovik notes that the actual artifacts from Gandzasar were transported to Armenia during 2020, so what Hajiyev mocked were replicas, museum display items standing in for a heritage Azerbaijan is working to erase. This scene sits inside a wider policy the hosts document elsewhere in the episode: the 13th century Armenian monastery relabeled as Caucasian Albanian, Dadivank recast the same way, and the Armenian identity of Hasan Jalalyan disputed. They place it alongside demolished churches, cemeteries, and memorials across the region, and the ethnic cleansing that emptied Artsakh of its more than 150,000 Armenian inhabitants in September 2023.

What makes the clip sting is the international audience. These were diplomats of an organization Armenia aspires to join, and their silence, as Asbed puts it, amounts to tacit agreement. The hosts connect the performance to Azerbaijan’s broader effort to normalize revisionism about Armenian history and the South Caucasus while Ilham Aliyev’s government continues its anti-Armenian policies. The blank pages become a symbol of the whole project: not just seizing land and monuments, but writing the people who built them out of the record entirely, with foreign officials nodding along.