Its architecture speaks of Christian history going back many centuries.

The church, in Aleppo, Syria, was built to commemorate those martyred in the 1915 Armenian genocide. It contained a shrine made of the bones of some of the slaughtered. The church was only consecrated in 1991.

Just 23 years later, in 2014, it was blown up by Islamic State.

Now it features on the BBC's Museum of Lost Objects series that traces stories of sites looted or destroyed in Iraq and Syria.

British-Armenian writer Nouritza Matossian, whose family was caught up in the persecution of the Armenians, told the BBC how she felt on seeing the desert shrine for the first time when she visited the church in 2001. 

"I was so shocked. I just stood and looked at the bones. Everybody was hushed, it was silent in there. We were all lost in our thoughts. It was really quite an isolated moment. It wasn't pulling at you to cry or weep. It was just very simple and dignified and noble."

She said her people had been driven across the deserts starving, without water, stripped naked, their clothes torn off their backs.

Heghnar Watenpaugh, Lebanese-Armenian historian at the University of California, said: "Deir al-Zour was the end of the road, it was the last Ottoman outpost into the desert in the eastern part of Syria. Beyond that there's really nothing, no settlements. Very few people made it there, and once they made it they were killed outright, or just succumbed to disease and starvation."

Turkey has always denied that the massacre of the Armenians was genocide.

Matossian was shocked that it had been destroyed so soon in its life.

"It's a very dark moment in our life, in our history. I never thought this could be repeated," she said.

She still owns a small box containing a tiny cross she bought at the shrine.

"The priest told me that that is the earth of Deir al-Zour. Some people take earth from where they're born and they spread it on their grave when they die. This soil has that significance. I always keep this box within eyesight, on my desk. I never expected that one day I would be looking at this box and that church would be gone, destroyed. It's very hard to accept."