Azerbaijan Launches Campaign Claiming Armenian Carpets as Its Own

• 04.14.2018, 17:07
•  Region,  World,  Diaspora

Asbarez

The Armenian Rugs Society, a Los Angeles-based organization dedicated to promoting, preserving and advancing Armenia’s ancient rug culture, has issued an announcement, in which it sounds an alarm on Azerbaijani campaign to claim ancient Armenian textiles and woven carpets as their own, PANArmenian reports, referring to Asbarez.

"Official Azerbaijan, in collusion with members of the private sector close to the Azeri regime, has launched a campaign geared towards appropriating ancient Armenian carpet, rug, and textile weaving traditions and production as their own by generating articles in local and international news outlets, sponsoring exhibits, and publishing art books that portray Armenian woven arts and history, as their own," the statement says.

According to the Society, this unabashed falsification of history and cultural capital is the latest in a long line of smear campaigns and propaganda that not only strike at the heart and soul of Armenian cultural identity, but is a harsh blow to the international arts community and to woven arts scholarship in general, putting in serious danger whole academic disciplines and bodies of work.

"This concerted effort to usurp, appropriate, and distort Armenian cultural traditions and production, and its dire consequences to international arts scholarship, must be stopped immediately'', the statement says.