Pashinyan describes Azerbaijani official’s Gandzasar statements as ‘unacceptable and incomprehensible’

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has described the latest statements by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s Assistant Hikmet Hajiyev concerning the Gandzasar monastery as “unacceptable and incomprehensible,” emphasizing that such rhetoric does not correspond to the logic of treating peace with the necessary care.

Pashinyan was asked about the matter in parliament by opposition Strong Armenia faction MP Lena Matevosyan.

Referring to the claims made by Hajiyev, the MP proposed that the prime minister declare from the podium that Gandzasar is Armenian.

Pashinyan responded that the Armenian side’s position regarding the origin of Gandzasar has already been presented through the director of the Mesrop Mashtots Matenadaran Institute of Ancient Manuscripts of Yerevan, whom he described as the “most competent official” on the matter.

“If we are interested in the origin of any manuscript or, even more so, of a monastic complex mentioned in a manuscript, we should turn to that manuscript and the original texts. And the Republic of Armenia has responded to this issue through the most competent official knowledgeable about this matter—the director of the Matenadaran—and has recorded Gandzasar’s Armenian origin, and I consider discussion of this topic completely pointless,” Pashinyan said.

The prime minister also noted that he considers it unfeasible to set the task of proving Gandzasar’s Armenian origin to Azerbaijan.

“But I also consider it pointless to set the goal if we set ourselves the task of proving it, for example, to Azerbaijan, because that is a pointless and unfeasible task. We should record that this is an unfeasible task, but that does not change, has not changed, and will not change anything for us. And I say again—we need to clearly separate the issues,” he noted.

Pashinyan also addressed the impact of Hajiyev’s statements on the peace process between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“As for the first part of your question, we have said and continue to say that established peace is a value for both Armenia and Azerbaijan, and both in Armenia and in Azerbaijan, it is necessary to treat peace with care,” the prime minister said.

He emphasized that statements concerning Gandzasar made by an official in Azerbaijan are unacceptable in this context.

“What we saw in Azerbaijan—by an Azerbaijani official—is, of course, all the more unacceptable and incomprehensible from this perspective,” Pashinyan declared.

At the same time, the prime minister stressed that despite such manifestations, Armenia should continue to treat the peace process with care.

“On the other hand, however, I want to record that we should continue to take care of peace. Moreover, this is not something we are saying for the first time. I said this on August 8, 2025,” Pashinyan said.

On September 12, Hajiyev took foreign diplomats accredited to Azerbaijan on a tour of Karabakh. They visited the ancient Armenian Apostolic Gandzasar and Dadivank monasteries in the Azerbaijani districts of Aghdara and Kalbajar.

At Gandzasar, Hajiyev presented the diplomats with copies of manuscripts remaining in the former Matenadaran branch, showing them their blank pages and claiming that they allegedly testify to the falsification of history by the Armenian side. Hajiyev misrepresented the Armenian Christian legacy as “Caucasian Albanian.”

The Mesrop Mashtots Matenadaran subsequently clarified that the manuscripts displayed in Gandzasar were not originals but specially prepared high-quality copies, whose originals are kept in Yerevan. The institution’s director said that Gandzasar “was one of the spiritual and cultural centres of the Armenian people.”