Shusha §

Cultural capital, fortress, trophy city

Shusha, or Shushi in Armenian, was one of the most important mixed urban centres of the South Caucasus. Built on a defensible plateau above Stepanakert, it served as a cultural centre for both Armenians and Azerbaijanis: Armenian printing, schools and churches stood beside Azerbaijani music, poetry, mosques and elite households. Its symbolic density is why every change of control has been narrated as more than a military event. editorial

The first catastrophe was the destruction of Armenian Shusha in March 1920, when the Armenian quarter was burned and a large share of the Armenian population killed or expelled. Armenian memory treats this as the loss of a cultural capital. Azerbaijani histories generally situate it inside the wider Armenian-Azerbaijani war and the revolt of Karabakh Armenians against Azerbaijani authority. The competing framings do not erase the material fact that the Armenian half of the city ceased to exist as it had been. contested

In May 1992 Armenian forces captured Shusha during the First Karabakh War, ending Azerbaijani control and displacing the Azerbaijani population. The capture also stopped much of the shelling of Stepanakert from the heights, which is central to the Armenian military narrative, but it made Shusha another lost city in Azerbaijani memory. In November 2020 Azerbaijani special forces retook the city in the decisive final phase of the Second Karabakh War Broers. The victory parade and state restoration projects that followed made Shusha the symbolic centre of Azerbaijan's post-2020 triumph.

The heritage question remains acute. The Ghazanchetsots Cathedral was struck during the 2020 war, and Armenian monuments, museums and cemeteries in and around the city have been monitored by Caucasus Heritage Watch. Shusha is thus a city in which each side can point to a real expulsion, a real cultural wound and a real claim of return.