Two kilometres west of modern Julfa lie the ruins of the Armenian city of Jugha, locally called Cuga, which flourished as a major trading hub on the Silk Road from roughly the ninth to seventeenth centuries. The site sits on the left bank of the Araz River, and across the water Iran's Jolfa faces it. What survives today includes the remains of several Armenian churches — the Andreordi, Pobloz, and St. Astvadsadsin — a substantial medieval caravanserai, fragments of a bridge across the Araz, and the thirteenth-century Gulistan burial vault.
Old Julfa was also the site of one of the world's great khachkar cemeteries, containing thousands of intricately carved Armenian cross-stones from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries. That cemetery was systematically destroyed by Azerbaijani authorities between the late 1990s and 2009, a loss documented by satellite imagery and widely condemned by UNESCO and heritage organisations. The land where the cemetery stood is now bare. What still stands at the ruins site itself is worth seeing for its historical weight and its extraordinary Silk Road context.