Martuni §

Eastern district under repeated pressure

Martuni is an eastern town and district of Nagorno-Karabakh, known in Azerbaijani administrative usage as Khojavend for the wider district. It sat near the eastern front of the former NKAO and became one of the places where rural Armenian communities, Azerbaijani forces and later de facto Artsakh institutions were most tightly compressed. Its significance is less iconic than Shusha or Stepanakert, but it shows the everyday geography of a long militarised line of contact.

During the First Karabakh War, Martuni and surrounding villages were shelled, raided and defended as part of the eastern front. The district remained under Armenian control after the 1994 ceasefire, forming part of the de facto Republic of Artsakh's normal civic geography: farms, schools, conscription, local administration and memorial culture. That ordinariness mattered. The political dispute was international, but residents lived it as a provincial district under permanent military threat. editorial

The 2020 war changed the district's perimeter. Azerbaijan captured nearby Hadrut and parts of the south, while Martuni remained inside the reduced Armenian-held territory under Russian peacekeeper protection. After the blockade began in December 2022, Martuni's isolation deepened with the rest of Nagorno-Karabakh. Food, medicine and fuel shortages were not abstract regional statistics; they affected towns like Martuni where local supply chains depended on the Lachin road.

In September 2023 Azerbaijani forces attacked across the residual front, including eastern sectors. The ceasefire and disarmament of the NKR Defence Army were followed by the evacuation of the Armenian population through Goris into Armenia. Martuni's post-2023 status is therefore the same structural paradox as the rest of the region: recognised Azerbaijani sovereignty was restored, while the Armenian community that had given the place its late-Soviet and post-Soviet political identity disappeared. editorial