Armenian 'Khachkars': symbols of tragedy and defiance.

"I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia."--William Saroyan

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When the Taliban in Afghanistan was destroying the figure of the Buddha, all human-kind cried bloody murder. But why, when Azerbaijan destroys Armenian relics and uses them for building materials, does the world stand silent?"

"It's a 'cultural genocide,'" says Dr. Armen Haghnazarian from Research of Armenian Architecture (RAA), which for the last 30 years has been documenting the remains of Armenian churches and calling for a stop to their destruction in neighboring Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia.(*1)

Here on the borders of the conflict with Islam is a part of life for the Christian Armenians; it goes all the way back to the days when they stood between pagan Rome and Zoroastrian Persia Though the Armenian nation officially declared itself Christian in 301, 30 years before Constantine did the same, they trace their Christian roots to the Apostles Bartholomew and Thaddeus who were martyred here and gave the name to the Armenian Apostolic church.

This once-glorious empire stretched from the Caspian to the Black Sea and included much of present-day Turkey and Iran. Today it is the smallest of the Caucasian nations, roughly the size of Maryland. It borders Islamic Turkey, Iran, and Azerbaijan, and to the north Orthodox Georgia - leaving many of its important religious monuments in the care of its Muslim neighbours

For a thousand years the rolling hills around …