Death of Samvel Karapetian (February 27, 2020)
Samvel Karapetian was a researcher and expert of Armenian medieval architecture who specialized in the study of Armenian historical monuments in Armenia, Artsakh, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Iran.
He was born in Yerevan on July 30, 1961. He graduated from the Missak Manouchian School in 1978 and threw himself into the work of surveying and cataloging artifacts of Armenian history and architecture for the next decades. Karapetian surveyed and catalogued thousands of artifacts of Armenian history and architecture during the course of more than two decades.
When he conducted his initial fieldwork in Artsakh in 1979, he discovered that the authorities of Azerbaijan considered the Armenian sites and monuments in this region as belonging to their own Christian Caucasian Albanian ancestors and that Armenian visitors were discouraged. It was forbidden to take photographs and even undertaking archaeological excavations was out of the question. Those prohibitions did not stop him from pursuing his work.
In 1989 he became a member of the Research on Armenian Architecture (RAA) founded in 1982 in Germany by architect Armen Hakhnazarian. This collaboration was strengthened after the independence of Armenia. Karapetian became the director of a team of about twenty people. His achievements include more than forty publications in the field of cultural heritage and local history. Among his books, mostly in Armenian, are Armenian Epigraphic Inscriptions in Caucasian Albania Proper (1997), Georgian State Policy and Historical Armenian Monuments, 1988–1998 (1998), Armenian Cultural Monuments in the Region of Karabakh (2001, in English), The Historical Monuments of Javakhk (2001), The Armenian Collection of the Caucasian Museum (2004), Northern Artsakh (2004), The Armenians of Kakheti (2004).
Karapetian accumulated a huge database on Armenian cultural heritage outside of Armenia based on fieldwork, with information about epigraphy and demography, information, bibliographical references, maps and photographs, descriptions of sites, architectural drawings and more. He covered a very large geographical area in all of the neighboring countries (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkey) and his interested covered all tangible cultural heritage, both civil and religious architecture. His research and publications provide elements of local history and qualitative analysis, essential for history in general.
As early as 1988, he introduced the reader to the vandalism directed at Armenian heritage and the state policies of Georgia (transformation of churches and erasure of Armenian epigraphic inscriptions), Azerbaijan (destruction of monuments), and Turkey. He also shed light on the practice of treasure hunters participating in the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage in Turkey. He was one of the first to have highlighted the mass cultural destruction of the neighboring states of Armenia (excluding Iran). Because of his work, he was declared persona non grata in Georgia and Azerbaijan. He submitted his findings to the U.S. Congress in 2007 and to the European Court of Human Rights in 2008.
Karapetian received many awards and recognitions for his scientific work, including the Mesrop Mashtots medal of the Republic of Artsakh (2001), a letter of blessing from His Holiness Catholicos Aram I (2003), the Presidential Prize of the Republic of Armenia (2006), the medal of honor of the National Assembly (2008), the Drastamat Kanayan medal of the Ministry of Defense (2010), and the golden medal of the Ministry of Culture (2012) among others. He was posthumously awarded the Movses Khorenatsi medal by the President of the Republic of Armenia in 2020.
Samvel Karapetian passed away after a long illness on February 27, 2020, in Yerevan.