When Faith Becomes a Frontline: A row over two monasteries in Garabagh reveals who still stands in the way of reconciliation, and who benefits.
Earlier this month, some 150 diplomats from 58 countries toured Garabagh at Azerbaijan's invitation. Such visits are no longer unusual. Diplomats have travelled to the territories restored to Azerbaijani control many times since 2020, and Armenia has rarely objected. This time was different. When the delegation stopped at the monasteries of Gandzasar and Khudavang, and Azerbaijani officials described them as part of the Caucasian Albanian Christian heritage, the reaction in Armenia was immediate. The Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, the seat of the Armenian Apostolic Church, denounced the visit as falsification. It rebuked the foreign diplomats for attending and demanded that the Armenian government take “concrete steps” in response.
The argument was ostensibly about the history of two medieval buildings. It was really about something larger: whether the narrative that fueled three decades of war can finally be retired, and whether the institution most invested in that narrative will allow it.
A church in politics
The Armenian Church is not just a place of worship. For centuries, in the absence of an Armenian state, it served as the political backbone of a scattered nation. That legacy explains its enormous moral authority today. It also explains why it has so often acted as a political player rather than a purely spiritual one.
Nowhere has that been clearer than in Garabagh. When the nationalist movement emerged in 1988, the Church lent it moral legitimacy. During the war of the early 1990s, it blessed soldiers and framed the conflict as the defence of an ancient Christian homeland. Karekin II, Catholicos since 1999, has consistently treated Garabagh as a sacred national question rather than a matter for negotiation. The practical effect was to give religious cover to the occupation of internationally recognized Azerbaijani territory, including seven surrounding districts whose Azerbaijani inhabitants were driven out.
The political geographers Gerard Toal and John O'Loughlin have described how churches, graveyards and carved stones are used in this region as proof of original ownership, a way to “imagine territory as sacred space.” Every monastery becomes a title deed. That is why the attribution of Gandzasar matters so much to nationalists: concede its Albanian past and part of the historical case for claims on Garabagh begins to crumble.
The Albanian question
Caucasian Albania, an ancient Christian kingdom on the territory of today's Azerbaijan, is the interesting chapter in this story. After the Arab conquest, most Caucasian Albanians converted to Islam, and those who remained Christian were gradually absorbed into the Armenian Church. Azerbaijani historians have long argued that this absorption involved the systematic erasure of Albanian identity. Even Ronald Suny, the eminent American historian of Armenian descent, notes that Garabagh's highland Albanians “remained largely Christian and eventually merged with the Armenians.”
Imperial Russia completed the process. After conquering the region, St Petersburg abolished the Albanian Catholicosate at Gandzasar, subordinating it to Etchmiadzin under the 1836 Statute. In 1909–1910, the Russian Holy Synod authorised Etchmiadzin to destroy old diocesan archives, including Gandzasar's. So little survived that the Albanian script was known mainly from fragments until palimpsests were found at Mount Sinai in the 1990s.
Thus, the story is not only about two churches - Caucasian Albanian and Armenian. It is also about the role of empires in it.
Moscow's old instrument
That last point matters, because the Church's relationship with Russia is not new. Historians such as Paul Werth have shown how the Tsars deliberately enhanced the Catholicos's prestige to project Russian power into the Ottoman and Persian empires. Felix Corley's work in the Soviet archives tells a similar story. Stalin nearly destroyed the Church in the 1930s, then revived it after 1943 when it became useful. It backed Soviet claims on the Turkish provinces of Kars and Ardahan, encouraged diaspora Armenians to “return” to Soviet Armenia, and served as Moscow's lever against the anti-Soviet diaspora during the Cold War. In 1956, during Khrushchev's thaw, it was the Armenian Catholicos who wrote to the Soviet prime minister, Nikolai Bulganin, presenting territorial claims on Azerbaijan and Georgia as the will of the diaspora.
The pattern persists. The Church's Russian diocese is led by the Catholicos's brother. Its most prominent patron, the Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, led the Kremlin-friendly bloc that lost to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in June's parliamentary election.
The peace spoiler
None of this would matter so much if Armenia and Azerbaijan were not closer to peace than at any time in a generation. Pashinyan has pursued normalisation with Baku and Ankara, including border delimitation. The Church has become the focal point of resistance. In 2024, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan led mass protests to topple the prime minister over what he called territorial concessions. In 2025, Galstanyan and another archbishop were arrested on coup charges. The Catholicos himself now faces trial, and the government's new programme calls openly for his replacement. The Church-aligned opposition also resists removing the reference to Garabagh from the preamble of Armenia's constitution, one of the steps a durable peace requires.
Critics in Armenia and the diaspora call Pashinyan's campaign an assault on church autonomy, and some Western observers share their concern about due process. Those are legitimate debates for Armenians to have. But from Baku’s perspective, the larger picture is hard to miss. An institution that sanctified the war, and that has served Russian strategy for two centuries, is now working to undermine the peace.
What the diplomats saw
The diplomats who visited Gandzasar saw two things. They saw ancient stones that belong to the shared Christian heritage of the South Caucasus, a heritage that Azerbaijan's Albanian-Udi community, the living heirs of Caucasian Albania, has every right to claim. And, in the reaction that followed, they saw why peace remains fragile. As long as history is treated as a weapon, and a religious institution acts as a vehicle for revanchism and foreign influence, reconciliation will remain hostage to the past.
However, the Armenian government also bears responsibility for the rising tension - words about normalisation go parallel with some clandestine links with public activists and diaspora linked to Garabagh movement.
Western governments that have invested in a peace agreement should say so plainly. Supporting peace in the South Caucasus means supporting the separation of faith from territorial claims, and recognising who is trying to stop that from happening.
