Restoration in Turkey often simply means destruction followed by a crude rebuilding - many historic monuments have been irreparably ruined by such "restorations" and the walls of Ani were not to be an exception, as these photographs reveal. In 1998 work on the walls had stopped after (it is said) some condemnation of the end results.

However, local building contractors and politicians (who are often the same people) were making a great deal of money from the "restorations". In 1999 the process of destruction was resumed on an even bigger scale and the workers now had an on-site stone cutting factory. The walls of this factory were built entirely from stone looted from the ruins!

These "restorations" have nothing to do with preserving the buildings or encouraging tourism, and their appalling results have nothing to do with just bad planning or a lack of knowledge of what should be done. There was never any valid archaeological reason to start the work because the work went against every established practice of modern archaeological conservation.

The truth is that the surviving monuments at Ani are being exploited rather like an open-cast mine for the extraction of money. As long as Ani can be used by Ankara politicians as a conduit to distribute State money into the pockets of their local political and business allies in Kars (Professor Karamağaralı has reportedly called them a "Mafia") then the "restorations" will continue until everything in Ani is destroyed.

Local opposition to the restorations is minimal, confined mostly to the few people in Kars who make a living from tourism. Within much of Turkish society there is a lack of understanding of the concept of an historic monument as understood elsewhere in the world. This must be partially connected to the unimportance given to historical truth in Turkey today. If no value is given to an accurate understanding of the past then objects related to that past have no value. Also, in Turkey, to criticise the powerful is a dangerous thing to do - it is too much to expect just for some old buildings that are not even Turkish.

Outside pressure is also unlikely. From foreign historians and archaeologists the silence has been total. There is no change here - they have been silent for decades, fearful of even mentioning the word "Armenia" lest Turkish officials get to hear of it and deny them their precious research permits for Turkey. Foreign tourists to Ani mostly don't care, would not be in the position to know what has been lost (unless they had visited this website), and are too few in number to matter anyway. The restorations at Ani are politely ignored by most guidebooks (along with the similarly disastrous restorations of nearby places such as the Ishakpasha palace and Sumela monastery).

Armenian groups are uninterested in doing anything practical. Many of these groups actually continue to present the lame old reasoning that nothing should be done towards pressuring the Turks on the issue of preserving Armenian monuments because it would only hasten the destruction of the remaining monuments. What has this pathetic policy of inactivity led to during the last few decades - has it saved a single building or has it just provided them with an easy excuse for doing nothing?

It ended in the near total destruction of this monument. There is now far more new stone than original stone in the palace, to the extent that the locals have nicknamed it "the prison" because of its appearance.

There is no archaeological or documentary evidence to show that the walls as rebuilt originally looked like this, and the new building work resulted in the destruction of large sections of original masonry. Also destroyed was most of the evidence, in the form of beam holes, of the palace's timber upper floors and outbuildings.

In the year 2000 a "restoration" started on the mosque of Minuchihr and the destructive restoration of the city walls had reached the Kars Gate. In 2001 the "restoration" of the city walls was extended easward to the Chequerboard Gate. In 2002 the "restoration" moved on to the walls to the east and south of that gate.