decorated with Christian motifs and engravings. According to the French traveler Alexandre de Rhodes, the cemetery still had 10,000 well-preserved khachkars when he visited Jugha in 1648. However, many khachkars were destroyed from this period onward to the point that only 5,000 were counted standing in 1903–1904. Scottish artist and traveler Robert Ker Porter described the cemetery in his 1821 book as follows: Vazken S. Ghougassian, writing in Encyclopædia Iranica, described the cemetery as the "until the end of the 20th century the most visible material evidence for Julfa’s glorious Armenian past." Destruction Background Armenia first brought up charges against the Azerbaijani government for destroying khachkars in 1998 in the town of Julfa. Several years earlier, Armenia had supported the Armenians of Karabakh to fight for their independence in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. The war concluded in 1994 when a cease fire was signed between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh established the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, an internationally unrecognized but de facto independent state. Since the end of the war, enmity against Armenians in Azerbaijan has built up. Sarah Pickman, writing in Archaeology, noted that the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh to the Armenians has "played a part in this attempt to eradicate the historical Armenian presence in Nakhchivan." In 1998, Azerbaijan dismissed Armenia's claims that the khachkars were being destroyed. Arpiar Petrosyan, a member of the organization Armenian Architecture in Iran, had initially pressed the claims after having witnessed and filmed bulldozers destroying the monuments. Hasan Zeynalov, the permanent representative of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic (NAR) in Baku, stated that the Armenian allegation was "another dirty lie of the Armenians." The government of Azerbaijan did not respond directly to the accusations but did state that "vandalism is not in the spirit of Azerbaijan." Armenia's claims provoked international scrutiny that, according to Armenian Minister of Culture Gagik Gyurdjian, helped to temporarily stop the destruction. Armenian archaeologists and experts on the khachkars in Nakhchivan stated that when they first visited the region in 1987, prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union, the monuments had stood intact and the region itself had as many as "27,000 monasteries, churches, khachkars, tombstones" among other cultural artifacts. By 1998, the number of khachkars was reduced to 2,700. The old cemetery of Julfa is known to specialists to have housed as many as 10,000 of these carved khachkar headstones, up