The recent visit by Russian leader Vladimir Putin to fellow fascist dictator Ilham Aliyev in Azerbaijan had ominous import in religious and historical matters too. Putin’s trip included a stop with Aliyev to Holy Myrrhbearers Cathedral, the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Caspian statelet, where Archimandrite Alexy, Bishop of Baku and Azerbaijan, told the visiting war criminals that the church houses a reliquary with a particle of Bartholomew the Apostle’s relics.
So far, so bad. Bishop Alexy, a useful puppet for both regimes he serves, said Bartholomew the Apostle had been martyred in Baku, hence lending support to the lies promoted by the Azerbaijani regime that seeks to appropriate the founding apostle, together with Thaddeus, of the Armenian Church. Putin, who probably flew to Baku to beg for weapons for his genocidal war on Ukraine, was obviously happy to be complicit in this charade.
The reliquary was brought to Baku by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople in 2003, so pointing out to its existence two decades later had no relevance whatsoever other than serving the Aliyev regime’s propaganda purposes. But saying that Bartholomew the Apostle was martyred in Baku is a patent falsity that should embarrass Archimandrite Alexy either for wantonly lying—again to contribute to Azerbaijan’s massive campaign of misinformation—or for his profound ignorance of Church history. Bartholomew the Apostle was martyred in Aghbak, in the region of Vasburakan, now occupied by Turkey like the rest of Western Armenia. In 1915, the Armenian population of Aghbak, which numbered around 10,000, was mostly exterminated during the Genocide. The few survivors settled in what is now the Republic of Armenia.
The goal for the mendacious rewriting of Bartholomew the Apostle’s life story is clear and the reason, obvious: in the time-honored Turkic tradition, you appropriate, rob, steal, or take by force anything you want and lack. Azerbaijan, a Frankenstein of a country hurriedly concocted in 1918 by the genocidal Ittihad junta and the pseudo-historical tradition created by purveyors of lies à la soviétique like Ziya Bünyatov and his ilk— Bünyatov was a notorious propagandist and plagiarist who, unsurprisingly, is celebrated as a “historian” by his fellow Azerbaijanis—is a voracious parasite that feeds and survives on every element of Armenian history it appropriates to construct a historical narrative it lacks.
Armenian scholar Hranoush Kharatyan and cartographer Rouben Galichian have warned about the dangers of this new historical distortion by Azerbaijan, “the North Korea on the Caspian”—the second oldest hereditary dictatorship in the world after the Kims, but equally corrupt and criminal as their peers in Pyongyang—and the need for the Armenian Church and scholars to rebut this new falsification in history. Otherwise, the Goebbels principle on the repetition of lies will ensure that today’s Azerbaijani humbug will become the historical fact of tomorrow. This cannot stand uncontested.