Pomploz Church (Julfa)
church in Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan
Pomploz Church was an Armenian church located near the village of Gulustan (Julfa District) of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan. The church was located on a hill near the banks of the Araxes river, approximately 300m northwest of the main caravanserai in Old Julfa.
History
The church was founded in 12th or 13th century and was restored in the 15th or 16th century. The church was still standing monument in the 1980s.
Architecture
Pomploz Church was a single-naved domed structure with a semi-circular apse and entrance in the west. There were Armenian inscriptions on its western and northern facades.
Destruction
The church was still extant in the 1980s and it was destroyed at some point between 1997 and September 23, 2003, as documented by Caucasus Heritage Watch.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Pomploz Church (Julfa)” is church in Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Pomploz, Church and Julfa, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “church in Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q97205621. Authority coordinates are 38.979, 45.571. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997 and 2003.
Architectural summaries often privilege surviving fabric and can understate demolished phases, contested use or displaced communities. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Pomploz Church (Julfa)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.