Shusha

Shusha was founded around 1752 by Panah Ali Khan, the first ruler of the Karabakh khanate, who moved his seat to a plateau ringed by cliffs and built walls across the only easy approach. The position made it one of the strongest fortresses in the Caucasus: it held out against a siege by the Persian ruler Agha Mohammad Khan in 1795, though he took the town two years later and was assassinated there. In 1805 the khanate passed under Russian protection by treaty, and in 1822 it was abolished and absorbed into the empire.

Under Russian rule Shusha grew into one of the larger towns of the South Caucasus, with an Azerbaijani and Armenian population living in separate quarters, a merchant class trading in silk and carpets, printing presses, schools and theatres. It became a centre of musical and literary life out of all proportion to its size. In the Shusha massacre of March 1920 the Armenian half of the town was destroyed by Azerbaijani forces and its Armenian inhabitants killed or driven out, and the town never recovered its former importance; the Soviet authorities made Khankendi, renamed Stepanakert, the administrative centre of the region instead, and Shusha became a quiet upland town of a few thousand people.

The Karabakh conflict of the late 1980s and 1990s displaced the town's population; Armenian forces took Shusha in 1992, and Azerbaijan regained control of it in 2020. Much of the historic fabric was damaged or lost during those decades. In 2021 the town was declared Azerbaijan's cultural capital, and a programme of reconstruction and resettlement is now under way, restoring mosques, mansions and the fortress walls while new housing is built.

Few small towns anywhere carry as much cultural weight in their national imagination. Shusha is described in Azerbaijan as the conservatory of the Caucasus, the place where mugham, the classical vocal art built on modal improvisation, was taught and refined through the 19th century. The composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov, founder of Azerbaijani opera, grew up here, the singer Bulbul was born just outside the town, and the poet Khurshidbanu Natavan, daughter of the last khan of Karabakh, held a literary circle in the town. The 18th-century poet Molla Panah Vagif, vizier of the khanate, is buried on the plateau.

The town was equally important to Armenians, whose churches, schools and printing houses stood alongside those of their Azerbaijani neighbours, and the competing memories of that shared and violent history remain a live subject. Visitors are expected to be careful in how they discuss it.

Musical life is being deliberately revived. The Kharibulbul festival, named after a small orchid of the local meadows, is held above the town in spring, and concerts, poetry days and official ceremonies are staged at the restored monuments. The Karabakh horse, a golden-coated breed raised in these uplands, is another emblem that appears at festivals. Manners are those of rural Azerbaijan: guests are fed generously, tea is endless, and elders set the tone of any gathering.

Shusha's population has turned over completely more than once. The 1989 census recorded about 17,000 people; the town was emptied during the fighting of the early 1990s, held a small Armenian population for the following decades, and lost that population after 2020. Today only a small number of permanent residents have returned, alongside a much larger transient presence of construction workers, restorers, soldiers and officials, with families returning gradually as houses and flats are completed under the state resettlement programme.

Daily life is therefore unlike anywhere else in the country. Building work sets the rhythm: cranes, scaffolding, stone-cutting and convoys of lorries on the mountain road. Shops, schools and public offices have reopened, and new hotels and cultural venues have been built for visitors and for the official events the town now hosts. Mobile coverage, electricity and water networks have been restored in stages.

The town's economy is almost entirely reconstruction, administration and the early stages of tourism; agriculture in the surrounding uplands is limited by mine clearance, which continues across the districts and dictates where people can walk, graze animals or build. The practical questions people discuss are the pace of housing, the arrival of services, jobs for returning families, and how long it will take before the town functions as an ordinary place again.

Karabakh cooking is highland cooking: lamb and mutton from flocks grazed on summer pastures, dairy in quantity, and preserves and dried fruit to carry the household through a long winter. Lamb is grilled over wood as kebab or slow-cooked in bozbash, a broth thickened with chickpeas and given sweetness by chestnuts, plums or quince. Dolma — vine leaves or vegetables stuffed with minced lamb, rice and herbs — is made everywhere, and plov, saffron rice served with a separate stew, marks weddings and holidays.

Dairy is the region's speciality. Sheep's and cow's milk become white cheeses kept in brine or in skins, thick clotted cream eaten with honey at breakfast, and soured drinks such as ayran to go with grilled meat. Honey from the high meadows of Kalbajar and the Shusha uplands has a long reputation, as do walnuts, cornelian cherries, mulberries and rosehips gathered from the hills and turned into the thick preserves served with tea.

Bread comes from the tendir, a clay oven sunk into the ground, and the flat rounds are baked in batches and eaten with everything. Qutab, thin folded pancakes filled with greens, cheese or pumpkin, are a common quick meal. The mineral springs of the wider region, above all Istisu in Kalbajar, gave their name to a bottled water known across the former Soviet Union. Meals end, as they do throughout Azerbaijan, with black tea poured into armudu glasses and a dish of jam.