🏳️ Nagorno-Karabakh at a Glance
🌍 Overview — Why This Page Exists
Nagorno-Karabakh is the hardest page in this factbook to write, because the place it describes has changed hands, names, populations and legal status inside a single human generation — and most recently inside a single week. For roughly thirty years it functioned as the self-declared Republic of Artsakh, an ethnic-Armenian statelet recognised by no United Nations member. On 19–20 September 2023 Azerbaijan launched a one-day military operation. The Artsakh defence forces capitulated within twenty-four hours. Within ten days more than 100,000 people — effectively the entire Armenian population — had driven the mountain road to Armenia. On 1 January 2024 the republic formally dissolved itself.
What exists today is the Karabakh Economic Region of the Republic of Azerbaijan: a landscape of extraordinary beauty, a vast reconstruction site, an active demining operation, and a resettlement programme moving Azerbaijani families into towns their parents and grandparents fled in the early 1990s. It is simultaneously one of the most heavily invested places in the South Caucasus and one of the most dangerous to wander into unaccompanied.
This page treats Nagorno-Karabakh the way the rest of the factbook treats anywhere else — geography, food, wine, monasteries, practicalities — while being direct about the fact that its cultural landscape and its current population belong to two different peoples, and that the transition between them was neither voluntary nor peaceful. Travellers who want the mountains without the history will not find them here. The history is the terrain.
Where it is
The eastern flank of the Lesser Caucasus, inside the internationally recognised borders of Azerbaijan, roughly 300 km west of Baku and about 40 km east of the Armenian border at its closest point. Iran is some 100 km south. Nothing here is more than a day's drive from three national capitals and all three of them have an opinion about it.
What it is called now
The Karabakh Economic Region and the East Zangezur Economic Region, two Azerbaijani administrative units created in 2021 that together cover the former autonomous oblast and the seven surrounding districts. The administrative centre is Khankendi, known to the people who built most of it as Stepanakert.
How big
The former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast was about 4,400 km². With the seven adjacent districts held by Armenian forces between 1994 and 2020 the contested area came to roughly 11,500 km² — about 14% of Azerbaijan's territory, or a little smaller than Northern Ireland.
Who lives there
As of March 2026, about 7,541 families — 30,261 people — resettled into 41 rebuilt settlements under the state's "Great Return" programme. Counting construction crews, seconded officials and police, total presence is estimated at 80,000–85,000. Before September 2023 the population was around 120,000, overwhelmingly Armenian. Today it is zero Armenians.
Can you go?
Not independently, and not from Armenia. Access is from within Azerbaijan, on a state-authorised tour, a business invitation or an accredited press visit, with a permit separate from your visa. Everything about that is covered in Getting There and Practical Information, and the honest short answer for most readers in 2026 is no.
2026 in one line
The peace declaration signed in Washington on 8 August 2025 has been initialled but not turned into a treaty; the last eleven Armenians in the region left on 23 January 2026; Karabakh University in Khankendi is into its second academic year; the Aghdam–Khankendi railway reached structural completion in spring; and ANAMA still expects to be clearing mines past 2030.
⚠️ Travel Advisory — Level 4: Do Not Travel
The United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia all advise against all travel to the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast and the surrounding districts — Aghdam, Aghdara, Fuzuli, Gubadli, Jabrayil, Kalbajar, Khankendi, Khojaly, Khojavend, Lachin, Shusha and Zangilan. The wider Azerbaijan advisory was raised to Level 3 — Reconsider Travel in March 2026. This is not a formality and it is not risk-theatre; three specific hazards compound one another.
💣 Landmines and UXO
The largest single risk, and the reason the advisory will not lift soon. ANAMA, the Azerbaijani mine action agency, has cleared substantial areas but the contaminated zone is measured in hundreds of square kilometres and clearance is projected to run past 2030. Civilian casualties still occur, including among construction workers and returning residents. See the dedicated section — it is the most important thing on this page.
⚖️ Legal exposure
Azerbaijani law criminalises entry into these territories without state authorisation. Anyone who visited the former Artsakh via Armenia is on a published blacklist and will be refused entry to Azerbaijan or detained on arrival. The list is public, it is searchable, and it has been enforced against journalists, academics and ordinary tourists alike.
🚩 Symbolic risk
Artsakh flags, insignia, maps showing Artsakh as independent, or Armenian-language advocacy material found on a phone, a laptop or in luggage will end a trip badly. Device inspection at the border is routine. This applies to things you have forgotten you have — an old photo, a cached map, a book jacket.
🚫 No independent travel
There is no version of this where you rent a car in Baku and drive to Shusha on your own. Checkpoints control every road into the region, the paperwork is checked, and the hire company will not release a vehicle for it. Access is by state-authorised tour, business invitation or accredited press visit only.
🇨🇿 What MZV ČR says
The Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs advises against travel to Nagorno-Karabakh and the adjacent districts, and there is no Czech consular presence anywhere near. The nearest embassy is in Baku, four to five hours away by road. Registration in DROZD is the bare minimum — see For Czech Readers.
🏥 Insurance
Most travel policies void cover for territories under a Level 4 advisory, which means an evacuation from a mine incident would be uninsured and would cost a six-figure sum. If you are going on a corporate or press programme, get the exclusion checked in writing before you fly, not after.
🏷️ Name & Identity — Every Word Here Is a Position
Almost every name for this region is a political statement, and choosing one is how locals and diplomats alike signal which side of the story they are standing on. There is no neutral vocabulary available, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty.
Nagorno-Karabakh
A linguistic sandwich that could only have been assembled by an empire. Nagorno- is Russian, from nagorny, "mountainous" or "highland". Kara is Turkic for "black". Bagh is Persian for "garden". The result — "Mountainous Black Garden" — is the standard international term precisely because it belongs fully to no one.
Dagliq Qarabag
The Azerbaijani rendering: the same meaning in a different grammar. This is what the region is called in every official document issued in Baku, and what is written on the new road signs, the new station names and the new university letterhead.
Artsakh
The Armenian name and by far the oldest in continuous use, appearing as the tenth province of the Kingdom of Greater Armenia in sources from the second century BC. When the republic renamed itself the Republic of Artsakh in 2017 it was making an explicit claim of antiquity. The name is now largely a term of memory and diaspora identity.
Khankendi / Stepanakert
The administrative centre. Khankendi means "the khan's village" in Azerbaijani and is the older name; Stepanakert is a Soviet coinage of 1923 honouring the Bolshevik Stepan Shaumian. The town that existed between 1923 and 2023 was called Stepanakert by the people who lived in it.
Shusha / Shushi
The plateau town, differing by one vowel and several centuries of grievance. Shusha is the Azerbaijani form and the one used by the 1977 Soviet heritage designation; Shushi is Armenian. Both refer to the same limestone table and the same two ruined-and-rebuilt religious buildings a kilometre apart.
The rest of the doubling
Aghdara/Martakert, Khojavend/Martuni, Lachin/Berdzor, Askeran/Askeran, Hadrut/Hadrut. In each pair, the map you are holding tells someone where you got it. This factbook uses current official Azerbaijani names for present-day places, with Armenian names alongside on first use, because both are needed to read the landscape and the literature honestly.
🗺️ Geography — A Region Built Entirely of Edges
Nagorno-Karabakh occupies the eastern flank of the Lesser Caucasus, where the Armenian highland plateau buckles and drops toward the Kur-Araz lowlands. The Karabakh Range runs north-west to south-east, throwing up peaks above 3,000 metres — Mount Gyamysh (Gomshasar) tops out at 3,724 m — and then collapsing eastward through a staircase of forested ridges, limestone gorges and terraced foothills into flat cotton country around Aghdam and Fuzuli.
That vertical drop is the whole story of the place, agriculturally and militarily. Within roughly sixty kilometres you pass from alpine meadow through dense oak, hornbeam and beech forest, into vineyard and mulberry terraces, and out onto irrigated plain. Whoever holds the top of the staircase can see everything below it, which is why the staircase has been fought over for three hundred years.
Forest and fauna
Roughly a third of the territory is forested — unusually high for the South Caucasus. The mountain forests shelter Caucasian red deer, brown bear, lynx and wild boar, and the critically endangered Caucasian leopard, of which a handful of individuals have been camera-trapped in the border ranges. Thirty years of near-total human absence from large tracts turned out to be good for almost everything except people.
Water
The Tartar (Terter) River drains the northern massif through the spectacular Janapar gorges and feeds the Sarsang Reservoir, a Soviet-era dam whose control has been a live political issue for three decades because it irrigates the lowlands downstream. The Khachen and Karkar cut the central valleys where Khankendi sits at about 850 m. In the south the Hakari joins the Araz along the Iranian frontier.
The Lachin corridor
The narrow mountain road linking the highland core westward to Armenia, roughly ten kilometres wide at its narrowest. It is the single most consequential piece of geography in the modern history of the region — it determined, more than any battlefield, who could hold the highlands and for how long, and its closure in December 2022 produced everything that followed.
The Shusha table
The plateau on which Shusha stands is a natural fortress: a limestone table at 1,400–1,600 m ringed on three sides by cliffs falling 300 metres into the Karkar gorge. That is precisely why an eighteenth-century khan built his capital on top of it, and why its fall on 8 November 2020 ended the Second Karabakh War in two days.
Azykh Cave
In the Khojavend district, one of the oldest known hominin sites in Eurasia, with occupation layers running back some 700,000 to 1.5 million years. A fragment of an archaic human jaw found here in 1968 is among the older hominin remains from the region. It is almost never visited and there is no visitor infrastructure of any kind.
The plain
East of the mountains, Aghdam, Fuzuli, Jabrayil and the Araz valley are hot, flat, irrigated and agriculturally rich — cotton, wheat, grapes, pomegranate. This is where the airports, the railway and the new industrial parks are being built, because it is the only part of the region where large-scale construction is straightforward and the demining is furthest advanced.
📜 Antiquity to the Khanate — Artsakh, Khachen and Shusha
The deep history of these mountains is Armenian, monastic and stubbornly local; the eighteenth century added a Turkic khanate and a fortress city; and the nineteenth century handed the whole thing to St Petersburg. Every claim made about the region in the last hundred years reaches back into this period for its evidence.
Artsakh in Greater Armenia
Artsakh appears as the tenth province of Greater Armenia under the Artaxiad and Arsacid dynasties, in sources from the second century BC. After Armenia's conversion to Christianity in the early fourth century the region became densely monastic, and its churches are the physical evidence on which the Armenian claim to continuity rests.
Caucasian Albania
The region also lay within or beside the kingdom of Caucasian Albania, a separate Christian polity absorbed by its neighbours by the early Middle Ages. Modern Azerbaijani scholarship advances the position that the medieval churches here are Albanian rather than Armenian. Most non-Azerbaijani specialists reject that framing, but you will meet it constantly in situ, on plaques and in guides.
The princes of Khachen
Through waves of Arab, Seljuk, Mongol and Persian overlordship, the princely house of Khachen maintained a semi-autonomous Armenian polity in these valleys. Its ruler Hasan-Jalal Dawla built Gandzasar in the thirteenth century, and his successors — the five meliks of Khamsa — held a version of that autonomy into the eighteenth century.
The Karabakh Khanate, 1750
Panah Ali Khan, a Turkic ruler under Persian suzerainty, founded the Karabakh Khanate and built his fortress on the Shusha plateau. Shusha became one of the great cultural cities of the Caucasus — the birthplace of Azerbaijani mugham and of a mixed Armenian-Azerbaijani urban elite that produced poets, composers and merchants in both languages.
Russia, 1813
The Treaty of Gulistan transferred the khanate to the Russian Empire in 1813, and the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828 completed Russia's absorption of the South Caucasus. Imperial administration encouraged Armenian resettlement from Persia and the Ottoman lands, shifting the demographic balance of the highlands in a way that later became the central fact in dispute.
March 1920
When Russia fell apart in 1917, Armenians and Azerbaijanis fought over Karabakh immediately. In March 1920 the Armenian quarter of Shusha was destroyed and thousands of its inhabitants killed — a catastrophe from which the town never fully recovered and which halved its population. The ruined quarter was still visible from the air seventy years later.
☭ The Soviet Oblast and the First War, 1923–1994
The modern conflict has a precise administrative origin. In 1921 the Soviet Caucasian Bureau assigned the mountainous portion of Karabakh to Soviet Azerbaijan; in 1923 it was constituted as the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast — an Armenian-majority enclave inside another republic, connected to Armenia by nothing. Every subsequent war traces back to that decision.
Seventy years of petitions
The NKAO's Armenian majority — around 94% in 1926, still about 76% in 1979 — petitioned Moscow for transfer to Armenia repeatedly: 1945, 1963, 1965, 1977. Each time the request was refused and the petitioners were disciplined. The grievance was continuous, documented and entirely ignored for two generations.
February 1988
The NKAO legislature voted to transfer to Armenia. Mass demonstrations followed in Yerevan and Stepanakert. Within a week the Sumgait pogrom killed Armenians in an Azerbaijani industrial city near Baku; expulsions began in both directions; the Baku pogrom followed in January 1990. By the time the USSR dissolved, several hundred thousand people on both sides had already been driven from their homes.
The war, 1991–1994
The vote became a war as the Soviet Union collapsed. Fighting ran from late 1991 to the Bishkek ceasefire of May 1994. Armenian forces took the former oblast and, crucially, seven adjacent Azerbaijani districts as a buffer — together roughly 14% of Azerbaijan's internationally recognised territory.
The cost
Around 30,000 dead. Roughly 700,000 Azerbaijanis and 350,000 Armenians displaced. Khojaly, where several hundred Azerbaijani civilians were killed in February 1992, is the single most charged place-name in Azerbaijani public memory. Maraga occupies a comparable place in Armenian memory. Both happened.
Aghdam emptied
The lowland city of Aghdam, population about 40,000, was captured in July 1993 and emptied. Over the following years it was stripped building by building for brick, pipe, wire and roofing until nothing stood but the mosque. It became the defining photograph of the frozen conflict.
Twenty-six frozen years
The OSCE Minsk Group — co-chaired by Russia, France and the United States — mediated from 1994 to 2020 and produced no settlement. The Madrid Principles of 2007 and their successors were never signed. Meanwhile Azerbaijani oil and gas revenue rebuilt the army, and the military balance that had produced the 1994 lines quietly inverted.
🎯 The Second Karabakh War — Forty-Four Days in 2020
On 27 September 2020 Azerbaijan attacked along the southern front. Forty-four days later the war was over and the map of the South Caucasus had been redrawn for the first time since 1994. It was the first modern war decided, in plain view, by cheap armed drones against a Soviet-pattern defence.
The technology
Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones and Israeli Harop loitering munitions against Soviet-era air defence, artillery and armour dug into fixed positions. Azerbaijan published the strike footage as it happened. Militaries worldwide rewrote their air-defence doctrine on the basis of what these six weeks demonstrated, and the lessons were re-learned two years later in Ukraine.
The ground war
The decisive advance was in the south, up the Araz valley through Jabrayil and Zangilan toward Lachin, turning the Armenian line rather than assaulting the mountains frontally. Hadrut fell in mid-October. Azerbaijani special forces then climbed the cliffs onto the Shusha plateau.
The fall of Shusha
8 November 2020. Shusha sits above Khankendi and commands the only good road out of it. Once Shusha fell, the highland core was militarily untenable, and everyone involved knew it within hours. The war ended two days later.
The 10 November agreement
A Russian-brokered trilateral statement. Azerbaijan kept what it had taken and Armenia handed back Aghdam, Kalbajar and Lachin on a schedule through December. Around 2,000 Russian peacekeepers deployed for five years along the line and the Lachin corridor. Nikol Pashinyan signed it at 1 a.m.; a mob sacked the Armenian parliament building the same night.
What was left of Artsakh
Roughly a third of the former oblast passed to Azerbaijan, including Shusha and Hadrut. The rump republic — about 120,000 people around Khankendi, Askeran, Martakert and Martuni — survived on a single road guaranteed by Russian troops. It was not a viable state and it lasted two years and ten months.
The cost
Somewhere around 6,500–7,000 dead on both sides, most of them conscripts in their early twenties. Around 90,000 Armenians were displaced from the transferred districts in November–December 2020, the great majority of whom would be displaced a second time three years later.
🚩 The Blockade, the Week, and the End of Artsakh
The end of the Republic of Artsakh took nine months of siege and then thirty hours of fighting. It is worth setting out precisely, because it is recent enough that accounts of it are still being actively shaped, and because the dates matter.
December 2022 — the road closes
A group presenting itself as Azerbaijani environmental activists blocked the Lachin corridor on 12 December 2022. In April 2023 Azerbaijan replaced the protest with a formal checkpoint at the Hakari bridge. From June the road was effectively shut to goods.
The nine months
Some 120,000 people lived under shortages of food, fuel, medicine and electricity. Bread was rationed; scheduled power cuts ran most of the day; ICRC convoys were admitted intermittently and then not at all. In August 2023 the former ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo published a legal opinion arguing the blockade met the Genocide Convention's definition; the analysis is contested but it defined how the siege was discussed internationally.
19–20 September 2023
Azerbaijan launched what it called an anti-terror operation at around 1 p.m. on 19 September, with artillery and drone strikes across the remaining territory. The Artsakh defence forces — out of fuel, ammunition and any realistic prospect of relief — capitulated the following day. At least 200 people were killed. The Russian peacekeepers did not intervene.
24–30 September — the exodus
The road reopened westward and essentially the entire population used it. 100,417 of roughly 101,000 remaining Armenians crossed into Armenia in six days, in a queue of cars that took up to thirty hours to cover 70 km. On 25 September a fuel depot outside Khankendi exploded as people queued to fill up, killing at least 218. It is one of the fastest complete depopulations of a territory in modern European history.
28 September — the decree
President Samvel Shahramanyan signed a decree dissolving all state institutions of the Republic of Artsakh, effective 1 January 2024. Thirty-two years after its declaration of independence, the republic ended by its own signature. It had been recognised by zero UN member states, including Armenia.
The arrests
Eight senior figures were detained, several pulled off the road at the Lachin checkpoint as they left. In January 2025 a Baku court sentenced six former Artsakh leaders — among them ex-president Arayik Harutyunyan and the businessman Ruben Vardanyan, who received 21 years. The trials were closed to independent observers and are regarded outside Azerbaijan as political.
📅 Aftermath, 2024–2026 — The War Is Over, the Treaty Is Not
Three years on, the military question is settled and the legal one is not. The region is being rebuilt at a speed that surprises visitors, while the document that is supposed to close the conflict remains initialled, unsigned, and hostage to a constitutional referendum in another country.
April 2024 — Russia leaves
The Russian peacekeeping contingent withdrew ahead of schedule, more than a year before its mandate expired, without fanfare and without being asked twice. Moscow's thirty-year role as the arbiter of the South Caucasus effectively ended in that month, and the vacuum has been filled by Turkey, the EU and, increasingly, Washington.
8 August 2025 — Washington
Ilham Aliyev and Nikol Pashinyan signed a joint peace declaration at the White House, together with agreements on a transit route across southern Armenia. It is a political framework rather than a final treaty, and the distinction has held up everything since.
The constitutional obstacle
Baku requires Armenia to amend the preamble of its constitution, which references the 1990 declaration of independence and through it a unification claim on Karabakh. Amending it needs a referendum, currently expected in 2027, after the Armenian parliamentary elections held on 7 June 2026. Until then there is no treaty.
September 2025 — the university
Karabakh University opened in the former Artsakh State University buildings in Khankendi on 16 September 2025, with about 2,440 students across engineering, agriculture, education and philology. It is deliberately positioned as the anchor institution of the resettlement — a reason for young people to move rather than merely a service for those who have.
23 January 2026 — the last eleven
The final Armenian residents of the region, eleven elderly people in a Khankendi care home who had been too frail to travel in 2023, were transferred to Armenia. With that transfer the Armenian presence in Nagorno-Karabakh, continuous for something close to two thousand years, ended.
Spring 2026 — the railway
The Aghdam–Khankendi line, 110 km of standard gauge climbing from the plain into the highlands, reached structural completion. Passenger service has not yet begun. It is the physical expression of the whole project: the highlands are to be connected eastward to Baku, permanently, rather than westward to Armenia.
👥 People & Culture — Two Cultures in Two Tenses
Nagorno-Karabakh is the rare place where a travel writer must describe two cultures in two different tenses. The culture that shaped nearly every building older than five years is Armenian and is now present only in its architecture. The culture arriving to occupy those buildings is Azerbaijani, returning after thirty years of displacement, and is still in the process of becoming local again.
The Armenian layer
Karabakh Armenians spoke a distinctive eastern dialect, thick enough that Yerevan sometimes needed a moment to follow it, and had a reputation across the Caucasus for stubbornness and dark humour. Their material culture was monastic and defensive: hilltop churches, khachkars (carved cross-stones), fortified villages, and a cuisine built on mountain herbs and mulberry.
Where they are now
The living community is in Armenia — some 100,000 people spread through Yerevan, Kotayk and Syunik, many still identifying by the village they left, many housed in accommodation that was supposed to be temporary in 2023. Integration has been slower and more contested than the Armenian government expected, and a distinct displaced-Karabakhi political identity has formed.
The Azerbaijani layer
Karabakh is central to Azerbaijani cultural identity in a way outsiders consistently underestimate. Shusha is the cradle of mugham, the modal art-music tradition on UNESCO's intangible heritage list, and the birthplace of composers Uzeyir Hajibeyli and Bulbul. Thirty years of songs, poems and school curricula kept the region present in a country most of whose population could not visit it.
Kharibulbul and the horse
The Kharibulbul — a small orchid endemic to the Shusha plateau whose name means "the nightingale of the foreign land" — became the emblem of the displaced generation and now lends its name to the annual festival. The Karabakh horse, a distinct golden-chestnut mountain breed, appears on stamps, banknotes and every tourism campaign; a stallion was presented to Queen Elizabeth II in 1956.
The Great Return, by the numbers
By March 2026: 7,541 families, about 30,261 people, resettled into 41 rebuilt settlements. Total presence including construction crews, seconded public workers and police is estimated at 80,000–85,000. The declared target of 140,000 by end-2026 will not be met; analysts expect roughly 60,000 civilians by year-end. Around 105 families live in Shusha.
What daily life looks like
New towns with old names: freshly poured pavements, smart-village solar arrays, brand-new schools with intakes of forty children, and a demographic skew toward young families and men on rotation. Supermarkets are small and supply lines are long. It will be a decade before anyone can describe a settled contemporary culture here rather than a policy in progress.
🏛️ Heritage Under Dispute — Restoration, Removal, and the Argument in Between
The most consequential thing happening in Nagorno-Karabakh right now is not construction but curation: decisions about which buildings are repaired, which are re-attributed, and which quietly cease to exist. Any honest visitor should know that this argument is live, that it is being conducted partly through renovation, and that a repainted interior is not always a neutral act.
What the monitors document
Caucasus Heritage Watch at Cornell and the Armenian-run Monument Watch have used repeat satellite imagery to document the destruction or alteration of more than a hundred Armenian heritage structures between November 2020 and 2025, including village churches, cemeteries and khachkar fields. The methodology is public and the before-and-after imagery is published.
What Azerbaijan says
Baku rejects the framing and describes its work as restoration, pointing to substantial state spending on mosques, mausolea and the Shusha reserve, and to the condition in which Azerbaijani religious sites were left during the occupation years — the Aghdam mosque was used to stable livestock. Both of those points are true and neither answers the satellite imagery.
The Albanian argument
In several cases Azerbaijani institutions advance the position that medieval churches in the region are Caucasian Albanian rather than Armenian, and restoration has in at least one documented case removed Armenian inscriptions and later Armenian architectural additions. The great majority of non-Azerbaijani specialists reject the re-attribution as it is being applied here.
Ghazanchetsots
The Armenian cathedral in Shusha (1888) was shelled twice during the 2020 war — including a strike while journalists were inside — and has since been restored. The restoration removed later Armenian additions to the drum and dome, returning it, in the official account, to its nineteenth-century form. Armenian heritage bodies dispute both the basis and the execution.
Dadivank
The thirteenth-century monastery in Kalbajar holds one of the very few surviving medieval Armenian fresco cycles. It was listed among Europa Nostra's 7 Most Endangered heritage sites in 2023, with the listing renewed in 2025. It is physically intact and effectively inaccessible to the specialists who would assess it.
No independent eyes
UNESCO has repeatedly sought agreement for an independent mission to assess cultural property across the region. As of 2026 no such mission has been carried out. That absence — rather than any single demolition — is the core of the problem: there is no mechanism by which either side's account can be independently tested on the ground.
🏙️ Khankendi — The Administrative Centre
Khankendi — Stepanakert to the people who built most of it — sits at about 850 metres in the Karkar valley, under the Shusha plateau that dominates its southern skyline. It was a village of a few hundred until the Soviets made it the capital of the autonomous oblast in 1923, after which it grew into a compact, tree-lined provincial city of grid streets, low apartment blocks and a large central square.
The city changed hands without a battle in September 2023 and was almost entirely emptied within a week. It is now the seat of Azerbaijan's special representative for the region and the focus of the largest reconstruction effort anywhere in the country.
Karabakh University
Opened 16 September 2025 in the former Artsakh State University buildings, with around 2,440 students across faculties of engineering, agriculture, education and philology. Tuition incentives and guaranteed housing are used to draw students from Baku and Ganja. It is the single clearest signal that the resettlement is intended to be permanent.
Where you sleep
The Karabakh Marriott Khankendi, a 152-room four-star property, opened in December 2025 and is the region's first international-brand hotel. It is where every delegation, journalist and business visitor ends up, which makes its lobby the most efficient place in the region to find out what is actually going on.
Tatik-Papik
"Grandmother and Grandfather", formally We Are Our Mountains — the 1967 tufa sculpture of two elders' heads emerging from the rock on the ridge north of town. It was the emblem of Artsakh and appeared on its coat of arms. It has not been removed. What to do with it is one of the quiet open questions of the reconstruction, and the fact that it is still standing in 2026 is genuinely notable.
The resettlement districts
Karkijahan and other micro-districts on the edges of the city are the model: rebuilt apartment blocks, new schools, solar arrays, a clinic, and a bus to the university. They are clean, quiet, and conspicuously under-occupied, in the way of any new town that is filling up faster on paper than in fact.
What you are shown
Visitors on organised programmes are typically taken to the university, the renovated central square, a resettlement micro-district, and the panorama from the Shusha road. That is a real itinerary and it is also a curated one. Independent wandering is not permitted, and the parts of the city that have not been renovated are not on the route.
What is gone
The Artsakh parliament, the presidential administration, the state television building and the university as it was all ceased to exist as institutions in September 2023. The buildings largely stand. The archives, in most cases, do not — much was destroyed or removed in the final week, and what survives is in Yerevan.
🏰 Shusha — The Fortress on the Table
If you see only one place here, it is Shusha, and the reason is geological before it is historical. The town sits on a limestone plateau at 1,400–1,600 metres, ringed on three sides by vertical cliffs dropping into the Karkar gorge. Panah Ali Khan chose it in 1750 for exactly that reason, and the eighteenth-century curtain walls and the Ganja Gate still trace the one approachable edge.
Nineteenth-century Shusha was a genuine city — printing presses, theatres, a famous mixed merchant class, and the salons in which Azerbaijani mugham took its classical form. Two buildings a kilometre apart summarise everything about it, and both have been rebuilt in the current programme.
The mosque
The twin-minaret Yukhari Govhar Agha Mosque (1883), built by Karbalayi Safikhan Karabakhi, the same architect as the Aghdam Juma mosque. Restored and reopened, it is the ceremonial centre of the new Shusha and the backdrop to most official photography from the region.
The cathedral
The Armenian Ghazanchetsots Cathedral (1888), whose white limestone dome is visible from most of the plateau. Shelled twice in 2020 and since restored, with later Armenian additions to the dome removed — a restoration contested by Armenian heritage bodies. Standing between the two buildings is the single most efficient way to understand this region.
Heritage status
Declared a State Historical and Architectural Reserve in 1977, named Azerbaijan's cultural capital in 2021 and the Turkic World's cultural capital for 2023. Submitted to UNESCO's Tentative List in 2022 as the "Susha historical and architectural reserve", with a full nomination dossier signalled for the World Heritage Committee in 2027.
Jidir Duzu
The "plain of horse races" on the lip of the gorge above the town: empty, enormous, and the finest viewpoint in the region. Historically the racing ground of the khans, it now hosts the annual Kharibulbul festival in May and equestrian displays with Karabakh horses.
The museums
The House-Museum of Molla Panah Vagif and his hilltop mausoleum have been rebuilt, as have the Bulbul and Uzeyir Hajibeyli house-museums. Together they constitute the official cultural argument for Shusha: that this plateau is the birthplace of modern Azerbaijani music and letters, which it substantially is.
How full is it?
Roughly 105 families — about 406 people — had resettled by spring 2026. On a weekday the town can feel like a beautifully restored film set waiting for its extras: perfect stonework, new lamp-posts, almost no one. On festival weekends it is genuinely full, which is a different and much better experience of the same streets.
🌑 Aghdam — The Ghost City
Aghdam is the most disturbing thing in the South Caucasus and one of the most instructive. A lowland city of roughly 40,000 before 1993, it was captured, emptied, and then dismantled over the following decades — not bombed flat but stripped, building by building, for brick, pipe, wire and roofing. Journalists who reached it during the ceasefire years called it the Hiroshima of the Caucasus, and photographs of its roofless grid became the defining image of the frozen conflict.
The mosque that survived
One structure came through largely intact: the Juma Mosque of 1868–70, built by Karbalayi Safikhan Karabakhi, its twin minarets standing over an otherwise erased skyline. During the occupation years it was used to stable livestock — a fact that appears in every Azerbaijani account of the period and that is, unlike much else said on all sides here, straightforwardly documented in photographs.
Rebuilding from nothing
Azerbaijan is rebuilding Aghdam on a master plan for an eventual 100,000 residents, with an industrial park, a "smart city" utilities design, and full replacement of everything below ground. It is the largest greenfield urban project in the Caucasus and the one the state is proudest of.
The memorial zone
A section of the roofless housing blocks is being deliberately retained as a monument, beside the restored mosque. It is not a gem in any comfortable sense, but it is the single most eloquent square kilometre in the South Caucasus, and it is the one place in the region where the official narrative and the visible evidence point in exactly the same direction.
The railway
The Aghdam–Khankendi railway, 110 km of standard gauge climbing from the plain into the highlands, reached structural completion in spring 2026 and is intended to become the region's freight and passenger spine, connecting onward to the rebuilt Baku–Horadiz line.
Qarabag FK
The football club founded here in 1951 has played in exile in Baku since 1993 under the slogan "the team without a home". It is Azerbaijan's most successful club by a wide margin. It has stated its intention to return to a rebuilt Imarat Stadium in Aghdam — see Sports.
Why you are taken here first
Aghdam is lowland, largely demined along the main axes, close to Fuzuli airport and unambiguous in what it shows. Almost every official delegation is taken here first, and unlike most stops on the official circuit, there is no reason to resent that.
⛪ The Monasteries — Gandzasar, Dadivank, Amaras
The monastic architecture of these mountains is world-class, and it is the reason art historians have argued about this region for two centuries. All three of the great foundations are structurally intact. None of them is currently open to general tourism. Their inclusion here is descriptive, not an itinerary.
Gandzasar
"Treasure mountain", above the village of Vank in the Aghdara district, completed in 1238 under Hasan-Jalal Dawla of Khachen. Its umbrella-shaped drum, carved with a crucifixion relief and dense figural ornament, is regarded as one of the finest achievements of medieval Armenian architecture — the art historian Anatoly Yakobson called it an encyclopaedia of it.
Dadivank
In the Kalbajar district, the largest monastic complex in the region, founded on the traditional burial site of Saint Dadi, a disciple of Thaddeus the Apostle, with its principal cathedral dated 1214. Its fresco cycle is among the very few surviving medieval Armenian wall-painting programmes. Listed by Europa Nostra among Europe's 7 Most Endangered sites in 2023, renewed 2025.
Amaras
In the Khojavend district, the oldest of the three — begun by Gregory the Illuminator in the early fourth century, with the tomb of his grandson Grigoris beneath the sanctuary. Mesrop Mashtots, inventor of the Armenian alphabet, is traditionally held to have opened the first school teaching it here in the fifth century, which gives Amaras considerable emotional weight for Armenians well beyond Karabakh.
Yeghishe Arakyal
Near Mataghis in the north, a monastery complex traditionally associated with the burial of Saint Elisha, the apostle of the Caucasus. Less celebrated than the big three and, like them, unreachable. A great deal of the region's monastic fabric is of this second rank — small, remote, undocumented in any detail, and now effectively invisible.
Handaberd and Khudavang
Ruined mountain strongholds swallowed by beech forest, the kind of site that a hiking economy would have built a trail to in any other country. The Janapar Trail — a waymarked long-distance route through exactly this landscape, walked by a modest but devoted international following before 2020 — no longer exists in any usable form.
Azykh Cave
In Khojavend: Lower Palaeolithic occupation layers up to 1.5 million years old, making it among the earliest hominin sites in Eurasia. It is of genuine global scientific importance, it has never been properly excavated by a modern international team, and it sits in a district where leaving the road is lethal.
🛣️ The Lachin Corridor & Kalbajar
The Lachin corridor is a road, and it is also the hinge on which the last thirty-five years turned. Running west from Shusha through the town of Lachin (Armenian: Berdzor) toward Goris in Armenia, it was the only land link between the highland core and Armenia. Held by Armenian forces from 1992, guaranteed by Russian peacekeepers after 2020, checkpointed by Azerbaijan in April 2023 and closed for nine months, its blockade preceded and effectively produced the September 2023 exodus.
The new alignment
A rebuilt road bypassing Lachin town opened in 2022, and the town itself was handed to Azerbaijan in August 2022. The bypass was built precisely so that the corridor could function without Armenian traffic passing through an Azerbaijani-administered settlement — and then, within four months, the corridor stopped functioning at all.
Lachin today
Rebuilt as a resettlement centre with its own international airport (LLN), opened in 2024 — the third built in the region in four years. New housing, a new administrative quarter, a new hotel or two. A town of a few thousand with an international airport is an unusual thing, and it tells you what the airport is really for.
Kalbajar — the wildest district
High alpine country between the Murovdag range and the Armenian border: hot mineral springs at Istisu that supported a Soviet sanatorium industry, gold deposits at Soyudlu, and the Tartar gorge cutting through it. It holds Dadivank and the region's highest passes.
Kalbajar — the reality
It is the least demined and the most emphatically closed part of the region. Snow holds the high passes into June. The honest advice about Kalbajar for the foreseeable future is simply: not yet, and probably not this decade.
Sarsang
The Sarsang Reservoir, a 125 m Soviet dam in a forested bowl on the Tartar, is the most photogenic piece of infrastructure in the Caucasus and was for three decades one of the most contested — it irrigates lowland Azerbaijani districts and was controlled from the highlands. That argument is now moot; the dam is under single administration for the first time since 1991.
Zangezur and the transit route
South of the region, the transit corridor across southern Armenia linking Azerbaijan proper to Nakhchivan — agreed in principle at Washington in August 2025 — is the next piece of contested geography. Armenia insists on its own sovereignty and customs control over the route. Nothing about it is built yet.
🌡️ Climate & Best Time to Visit
Altitude does everything here. There is no single climate for the region; there is a staircase, and which step you are standing on decides what month you should be there.
Khankendi, 850 m
Warm dry summers (26–30 °C in July) and cold snowy winters dipping below −5 °C. This is the most liveable step and it is where almost all the new housing is.
Shusha, 1,500 m
Six to eight degrees cooler year-round than Khankendi, which is why it was an Imperial Russian summer hill station. Exposed, windy, and genuinely cold from November. In July it is the most comfortable place in the South Caucasus.
The plain, 200–400 m
Aghdam, Fuzuli and the Araz valley are properly hot — 35 °C and humid in midsummer, with the haze that comes off irrigated cotton country. Spring and late autumn are the only pleasant seasons down here.
Kalbajar, 2,000 m+
High passes hold snow into June. Winter closes the district entirely. Even in the unlikely event that access opens, the practical window would be July to September.
✅ May–early June — the best window
Alpine flowers, the Kharibulbul festival on the Jidir Duzu, green forest and comfortable temperatures at every elevation simultaneously. If you get one authorised trip, take it in the last week of May.
September–October — the second choice
Grape and mulberry harvest, clear hard light, and spectacular beech and hornbeam colour through the Tartar gorge. Cooler on the plateau than most visitors expect; pack for 5 °C at night by mid-October.
November to March is cold, frequently snowbound above 1,200 m, and the season in which access to the region is at its most restricted — partly weather, partly the thinner flight schedule, partly that there is less the state wants to show in the rain. July and August are fine on the plateau and unpleasant on the plain.
🍴 Cuisine — Mountain Food from a Region of Mulberry and Herbs
Karabakh cooking is mountain food from a region where mulberry, walnut, wild herbs and lamb were always more reliable than wheat. Armenian and Azerbaijani versions of these dishes overlap almost completely and differ mainly in name — which is either a happy accident of shared geography or the least controversial thing about the place, depending on who you ask.
🥬 Jingalov hats
The one genuinely, unarguably Karabakh dish: a thin flatbread packed with seven to twenty different wild greens, cooked dry on a hot plate. Armenian in name and origin, made across the region, and now most reliably found in Yerevan. Recipe in the next section.
🍚 Plov
The festive rice dish, in the Karabakh version defined by its gazmag — the golden crust of dough or yoghurt-batter formed at the base of the pot, broken over the rice at the table. Lamb, dried apricot, chestnut and raisin; saffron; a great deal of butter.
🍖 Khorovats / kabab
Skewered lamb over vine cuttings, salted only, served on lavash with grilled aubergine, pepper and tomato slipped from their skins. The word differs by language; the fire, the cuttings and the method do not.
🥐 Kyata / gata
A layered sweet bread with a filling of flour, butter and sugar worked to a sandy crumb (khoriz), baked until deep gold. Every household claims a different lamination and every one of them is correct.
🫐 Mulberry everything
This is mulberry country. The fruit becomes syrup (doshab), fruit leather, vodka, and a thick sweet paste eaten with walnuts. Doshab in particular — dark, almost savoury, closer to pomegranate molasses than to honey — is the flavour that most distinguishes this kitchen from Yerevan's or Baku's.
🧀 Motal and the sour soups
Motal is a sharp sheep's-milk cheese aged in a skin bag, powerfully pungent, traditionally broken into cold buttermilk. Sour spring soups built on sorrel and yoghurt, thickened with an egg tempered in slowly so it does not split, are the other signature — mountain food for the weeks before anything else is ready.
What you will actually be fed on an authorised programme is Azerbaijani restaurant cooking of a good national standard — plov, kebab, dolma, fresh herbs, quince preserve with tea — rather than anything specifically Karabakhi, because the domestic cooking tradition of the highlands left in September 2023 and the new one has not had time to form.
🍳 Three Karabakh Recipes
Three dishes that will get you closer to this region than any photograph currently can. The first is the only one that is uniquely Karabakhi; the second is the regional version of a dish the whole Caucasus makes; the third is what you eat at the end of everything.
🥬 Jingalov Hats
Karabakh herb flatbread · makes 6 · about 1 hour plus 30 min resting · vegan
Ingredients: Dough: 400 g plain flour, 250 ml warm water, 1 tsp salt — no yeast, no fat. Filling: 700–900 g mixed greens (spinach, chard, sorrel, dandelion, nettle, coriander, dill, spring onion, purslane, beet tops, plus whatever is in season — aim for at least seven kinds), 2 tbsp sunflower oil, salt, a pinch of chilli. Butter to finish; cold ayran to drink.
Method: Knead the dough until smooth and rest it 30 minutes under a cloth. Wash and dry the greens thoroughly, then chop them very fine — this is twenty minutes of work and the dish fails without it. Toss with oil, salt and chilli and let stand 10 minutes so they wilt slightly. Divide the dough into six balls and roll each to a 25 cm circle, as thin as you dare. Heap a generous fist of greens on one half, fold over, and seal by pinching and rolling the edge inward, then gently flatten the whole parcel with the rolling pin until it is an even oval. Cook on a dry cast-iron pan or saj over medium-high heat, 2–3 minutes per side, until blistered and lightly charred. Brush with butter and eat immediately.
💡 The greens should look like far too much. If the parcel is easy to seal, you have used too few.
🍚 Karabakh Basdirma Plov
Festive lamb and fruit plov with gazmag crust · serves 6 · about 2½ hours plus soaking
Ingredients: 500 g long-grain rice (basmati or sella), 800 g lamb shoulder in large cubes, 2 onions sliced, 150 g dried apricots, 100 g peeled chestnuts, 100 g raisins, 1 tsp saffron steeped in 3 tbsp hot water, 150 g butter or lamb fat, salt, black pepper, 1 tsp turmeric. For the gazmag: 150 g flour, 1 egg, 3 tbsp yoghurt, a pinch of salt.
Method: Soak the rice in salted water for 2 hours, then drain. Brown the lamb in butter with the onions, add turmeric, pepper and a little water, cover and braise 60–75 minutes until tender; add the apricots, chestnuts and raisins for the last 15 minutes. Meanwhile boil the rice in plenty of salted water for exactly 5–7 minutes — it must remain firm at the core — and drain. Make a soft gazmag dough, roll it thin, and lay it over melted butter in the base of a heavy pot. Pile the rice on top in a cone, poke a few steam holes with the handle of a spoon, pour over the saffron water and the remaining melted butter, wrap the lid in a cloth and steam on the lowest heat for 40 minutes. Serve the rice mounded, the meat and fruit alongside, and break the crisp gazmag over the top at the table.
💡 The cloth around the lid is not optional — it absorbs the condensation that would otherwise drip back and ruin both the crust and the grain.
🥐 Gata (Kyata)
Layered sweet bread with a butter-and-sugar crumb · makes 2 large rounds · about 2 hours
Ingredients: Dough: 500 g plain flour, 200 g cold butter, 200 ml sour cream or matsoni, 1 egg, 1 tsp baking powder, pinch of salt. Khoriz filling: 200 g plain flour, 150 g soft butter, 150 g sugar, 1 tsp ground cardamom or vanilla. To glaze: 1 egg yolk beaten with a splash of milk.
Method: Rub the cold butter into the flour and baking powder, then bring together with the sour cream and egg into a soft dough; chill 30 minutes. For the khoriz, work the soft butter, sugar and flour with your fingertips until it is an even sandy crumb — do not let it become a paste. Roll the dough out thin, spread with half the khoriz, fold in three, roll out again and fold again; this lamination is what makes the layers. Shape into a round about 3 cm thick, score the top in a diamond lattice with a fork or a knife tip, brush with egg yolk and bake at 180 °C for 35–40 minutes until deep gold. Cool completely before cutting.
💡 Gata is a keeping cake — it is better on day two, and it is what travels in the car.
🍷 Wine & Spirits — Khndoghni, and a Vineyard That Moved
Karabakh is real wine country, and the fact that almost none of its wine is currently made in Karabakh is one of the stranger footnotes in the wine world. The indigenous red grape is Khndoghni, also called Sireni — a thick-skinned mountain variety giving deeply coloured, firmly tannic wines with black plum, dried herb and a distinctly savoury, iron-like finish. It ripens well at 600–900 metres on the limestone-clay terraces around Togh, Tsakuri and Khojavend.
The Soviet scale
At its peak the region carried up to 18,200 hectares of vineyard and produced industrial volumes of blending wine for the all-Union market — quantity rather than quality, as everywhere in the Soviet wine economy. Most of it was pulled up or abandoned during and after the first war.
Kataro at Togh
The revival's flagship: founded in a village house at Togh in 2010, producing perhaps 100,000 bottles a year of serious Khndoghni and winning international medals. It was the proof that the grape could make fine wine and not just volume.
The vineyard that moved
Togh fell within the territory transferred in November 2020. The Kataro family relocated to Yeghegnadzor in Armenia's Vayots Dzor, physically carrying cuttings out, and now bottles Khndoghni from vines planted 200 km away under the name Vine of Artsakh. It is one of the very few cases in modern wine of an appellation being evacuated.
What is left in bottle
Pre-2020 vintages made from Togh fruit are now finite and collectable. If you find a Kataro 2018 or 2019 on a list in Yerevan or Tbilisi, that is wine from vineyards that are now on the other side of a closed line, made by people who no longer live there.
The Azerbaijani replanting
Azerbaijan has begun replanting commercial vineyards in the Khojavend and Jabrayil districts as part of the agricultural reconstruction. Nothing of consequence has yet been bottled from them — young vines, and a region without a single functioning winery as of 2026. Give it a decade.
🥂 Tutovka
Mulberry oghi, usually 50–60% ABV, distilled twice from fermented white mulberries, is the true spirit of these mountains — floral, oily and nothing like grape brandy. Cornelian-cherry and cornel-berry oghi appear in autumn. On the Azerbaijani side, Karabakh mulberry vodka is being revived commercially as a heritage product.
Artsakh Brandy Company at Askeran produced grape and mulberry distillates that were a household name across the Caucasus; legacy stock still circulates and the brand name is now, inevitably, contested. Non-alcoholically, the region drinks Armenian-style black tea with mountain thyme, Azerbaijani tea in armudu pear-glasses with quince or white-cherry preserve, and tan / ayran — salted diluted yoghurt, which is what everyone actually drinks with jingalov hats.
🏆 Kaufmann Wine Score — Nagorno-Karabakh
Rated on four criteria: Aroma (/25) · Taste (/30) · Finish (/20) · Value (/25) — Total /100. Every wine below is either made from Karabakh fruit or by Karabakh producers; as of 2026 none of them is made in Karabakh, which is the point.
| Wine | 🔴 Aroma | 🟡 Taste | 🟢 Finish | 🔵 Value | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kataro Reserve — Vine of Artsakh 2022 Khndoghni, vinified in Yeghegnadzor | 22 | 27 | 18 | 22 | 89 |
| Kataro 2018 Last pre-war Togh vintage, 100% Khndoghni | 22 | 26 | 18 | 21 | 87 |
| Artsakh Brandy 10-Year Askeran legacy stock | 20 | 25 | 17 | 21 | 83 |
| Tigranakert Khndoghni 2019 Rare surviving bottles | 19 | 24 | 15 | 21 | 79 |
| Sireni Mulberry Oghi Tutovka, ~55% ABV | 20 | 22 | 14 | 20 | 76 |
95–100 Legendary · 90–94 Outstanding · 85–89 Very Good · 80–84 Good · 75–79 Average · <75 Below Average
🍸 Cocktails — Three House Constructions
There is no cocktail tradition in these mountains. Spirits are drunk neat, at room temperature, with a toast and a piece of bread, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The three below are house constructions built on regional ingredients, developed for this factbook rather than found in a bar in Shusha.
🟣 The Black Garden
50 ml mulberry oghi (tutovka) · 20 ml mulberry doshab syrup · 20 ml fresh lemon · 2 dashes walnut bitters · 1 egg white. Dry-shake hard, then shake with ice and fine-strain into a coupe. Grate a little toasted walnut over the foam. The doshab gives it an almost savoury darkness — this is not a sweet drink.
🌿 Kharibulbul
45 ml Karabakh brandy · 15 ml quince preserve syrup · 15 ml lemon · 60 ml strong cold black tea · thyme sprig. Build over ice in a highball, stir, garnish with mountain thyme. Named for the orchid; drinks like a Caucasian long tea punch and is the one of the three you could serve at lunch.
🍉 Gorge Road
50 ml Khndoghni red wine · 25 ml cornelian-cherry oghi · 10 ml honey syrup · 3 dashes orange bitters. Stir over a large cube, express orange peel. Tannic, sour-cherry, faintly medicinal — the taste equivalent of a switchback.
✈️ Getting There — Three New Airports and One Closed Border
The essential point first: there is no route into this region from Armenia. That border is closed, and crossing it is a criminal offence under Azerbaijani law that will put you on a published blacklist. All access is from within Azerbaijan, with state authorisation.
Fuzuli (FZL)
Opened October 2021, the main gateway, serving Aghdam, Khojavend and the Shusha approach. AZAL operates scheduled domestic flights from Baku — typically twice weekly, Wednesday and Saturday, one-way fares around AZN 78 (roughly $46), flight time near 70 minutes.
Zangilan (ZZN)
Opened October 2022, serving East Zangezur and the Araz valley. Thin scheduled service; mostly delegation and charter traffic. Its architecture — a roof modelled on a bird's nest — is the most photographed building in the southern districts.
Lachin (LLN)
Opened 2024, serving the corridor towns. The third international airport built in the region in four years, in a district whose civilian population numbers in the low thousands. Schedules are thin and change often.
By road
The Victory Road (Zafar Yolu) from Fuzuli to Shusha and the rebuilt Ahmadbayli–Fuzuli–Shusha highway are modern, fast and spectacular. Baku to Fuzuli is roughly 300 km, four to five hours on the Baku–Horadiz motorway. Driving yourself into the region is not permitted without documentation; hired cars come with drivers who hold the paperwork.
By rail
The Baku–Horadiz line has been rebuilt and extended. The Aghdam–Khankendi line reached structural completion in spring 2026; passenger service had not commenced as of this writing but is the declared intention, and it will be the most scenic hour of railway in the Caucasus when it opens.
The permit
An Azerbaijani e-visa (US$25, 30 days, about three working days via the ASAN Visa portal) covers entry to the country but not to the Karabakh Economic Region. A separate state authorisation is required, arranged in practice through an accredited Azerbaijani tour operator, a business host, or — for journalists — the State Committee. Applications want passport details, itinerary and purpose two to four weeks ahead.
📋 Practical Information
🛂 Visas & permits
Azerbaijani e-visa US$25, 30 days single entry, via the official ASAN Visa portal, around 3 working days. Karabakh access requires an additional state permit arranged by your host or operator. Anyone with a history of entering the former NKAO from Armenia should assume they are on the blacklist and take advice before applying rather than after being detained.
💰 Money
Azerbaijani manat (AZN), pegged at roughly 1.70 AZN to the US dollar. Cards work in Khankendi, Shusha and the new hotels; carry cash for everything else. ATMs exist in Khankendi, Shusha, Aghdam, Fuzuli and Lachin but are few and occasionally out of notes. There is no banking infrastructure in the rural districts.
📱 Connectivity
Azercell and Bakcell provide 4G across the rebuilt settlements and the main highways; coverage disappears quickly in the gorges and the Kalbajar highlands. Fixed broadband is being installed as part of the smart-village programme. Armenian SIMs do not work and an Armenian roaming profile on your phone is not a good look at a checkpoint.
⚕️ Health
New hospitals and clinics have opened in Khankendi, Shusha, Aghdam and Fuzuli, but for anything serious the realistic destination is Baku — four to five hours by road or 70 minutes by air. Comprehensive insurance including medical evacuation is essential, and you must confirm in writing that your policy does not void cover for territories under a Level 4 advisory. Tap water in rebuilt settlements is treated; elsewhere, do not.
🔑 Etiquette & sensitivity
Do not carry Artsakh flags, maps showing Artsakh as independent, or Armenian political material. Ask before photographing military positions, checkpoints or resettled families — the first two will be refused and the third deserves the courtesy. Remember that everyone you meet in a resettlement district was themselves displaced in the 1990s; listening is more useful than arguing.
🎒 What to pack
Layers, because you will move through 1,000 metres of altitude in an afternoon. Walking boots with ankle support — rebuilt towns have new pavements, everywhere else is rubble and rough track. A windproof shell for the plateau. Sun protection at altitude. A power bank. Cash in small manat notes. A printed copy of your permit and visa plus your operator's contact details on paper, because you will be asked at checkpoints and your phone will pick the worst moment to die. Modest clothing for mosque visits. A head torch.
💣 Landmines — Read This Twice
This is the single most important practical fact on the page, and it is the one that visitors on a comfortable, catered, officially escorted programme are most likely to discount. ANAMA, the Azerbaijan National Agency for Mine Action, has cleared substantial areas, but the contaminated zone is measured in hundreds of square kilometres and clearance is projected to continue past 2030.
The scale
Azerbaijan describes the liberated territories as among the most heavily mined areas in the world, with both anti-personnel and anti-vehicle mines laid over three decades, plus unexploded ordnance from two wars. Minefield maps were handed over incompletely and, in places, inaccurately; a great deal of the contamination is being found rather than located.
The casualties
Deaths and amputations have continued every year since November 2020, running into the hundreds in total, among demining personnel, construction workers, returning residents and journalists. This is not a historical statistic. It is a current one, and it includes people who were being careful.
🚨 Never leave a paved surface
Not for a photograph. Not for a wildflower. Not to reach a church you can see from the road. Not to relieve yourself behind a tree. The verge is not the road. A tyre track is not clearance. The single rule that keeps people alive here is: stay on the asphalt.
Markers
Red-and-white markers, red-painted stones, and taped perimeters mean exactly what they appear to mean. But the inverse does not hold: unmarked ground is not therefore safe. Marking follows survey, survey follows resources, and large areas have had neither.
Where it is worst
Kalbajar, Gubadli, Jabrayil and Zangilan — the districts held longest and given up last — together with the former line of contact, which runs as a belt of dense contamination across the middle of the region. The lowland axes around Aghdam and Fuzuli are the most advanced in clearance, which is why they are on every itinerary.
If you are going anyway
Travel only with an operator that can name its clearance liaison. Confirm that every site on your itinerary is ANAMA-certified. Carry a satellite messenger, because mobile coverage fails exactly where the risk is highest. And make sure your insurer has confirmed in writing that a mine incident is covered — many policies exclude it twice over, once for the advisory level and once for the mechanism.
💵 Cost of Living — There Is No Budget Tier
Prices track Azerbaijani norms, but the region has almost no budget tier — the accommodation that exists was built new and priced for delegations. Figures are approximate for 2026; the exchange rate is pegged at roughly 1.70 AZN to the US dollar.
| Item | AZN | USD |
|---|---|---|
| Bottle of water | 0.60 | ~$0.35 |
| Tea in an armudu glass | 1–2 | ~$0.60–1.20 |
| Local meal, simple canteen | 8–15 | ~$5–9 |
| Dinner, hotel restaurant | 35–60 | ~$20–35 |
| Guesthouse / small hotel, night | 60–110 | ~$35–65 |
| Karabakh Marriott Khankendi, night | 190–320 | ~$110–190 |
| Baku–Fuzuli flight, one way | 78 | ~$46 |
| Car with driver, per day | 120–200 | ~$70–120 |
| Organised permit tour, per person per day | — | $180–350 |
Budget travel is not a realistic proposition here. The permit requirement makes the guided tour the floor price, not a luxury option, and a week in the region costs more than a week almost anywhere else in the Caucasus while offering substantially less freedom.
🏨 Accommodation
Khankendi
The Karabakh Marriott Khankendi — 152 rooms, four-star, opened December 2025 — is the region's only international-brand property and the default for business and delegation visits. A handful of smaller state-built hotels supplement it.
Shusha
Several restored boutique guesthouses and the rebuilt hotel stock around the central square. Small, atmospheric, and often block-booked during festival season, which is exactly when you would want to be there.
Aghdam & Fuzuli
New mid-range business hotels serving the airport and the construction economy. Functional rather than charming, but clean, new and close to the places you will actually be taken.
Lachin
A handful of new guesthouses aimed at the airport and the corridor road. Thin on the ground and dependent on whether the airport has a schedule that week.
Kalbajar
The Istisu spa complex is under redevelopment around the hot mineral springs; nothing is yet open to general visitors. When it opens it will be the most interesting accommodation in the region, and that is probably several years away.
How booking works
Almost always done by the operator holding your permit rather than directly. Walk-in accommodation is not a thing that exists here — there is no mechanism by which an unauthorised person could arrive at a front desk in the first place.
🎭 Festivals & Events
🌺 Kharibulbul International Folklore Festival
May, on the Jidir Duzu plain above the Shusha gorge. Revived in 2021 after a thirty-two-year interruption, it is the flagship cultural event of the reconstruction: mugham, ashiq bards, folk ensembles from across the Turkic world, and the orchid that gives it its name. It is also the single best chance a visitor has of seeing the plateau full of people.
📜 Vagif Poetry Days
Late August / September in Shusha, honouring Molla Panah Vagif at his rebuilt mausoleum. Also revived in 2021, after an interruption that began in 1991 when the original mausoleum was destroyed.
🔥 Novruz
20–21 March, the pre-Islamic spring new year: bonfires, semeni wheatgrass, sweets and public celebration in every resettled town. In a region of brand-new settlements it does more social work than anywhere else in Azerbaijan — it is the occasion on which neighbours who have not lived together before meet each other.
🎖️ 8 November — Victory Day
The national commemoration of the fall of Shusha in 2020, heavily observed here. A date on which a foreign visitor should be conscious of their own presence and should not expect the day to be about anything other than what it is about.
🕌 Religious observance
Commemorations at the restored Aghdam Juma Mosque and the Shusha mosques, plus a growing calendar of resettlement-anniversary events as each village reaches its first, second and third year.
🍃 What is no longer held here
Armenian Karabakh observed the Zhengyalov Hats festival at Togh and Vardavar in July. Both continue — in the displaced communities of Armenia, not in the region. The Togh festival is now held in Vayots Dzor, alongside the relocated vineyard.
🏛️ UNESCO & World Heritage — World Heritage Quality, Zero Protection
Inscribed World Heritage Sites: none. This is not for want of candidates but because of the region's status. Azerbaijan currently has five inscribed sites nationally and eleven on its Tentative List, and none of them is here.
The Tentative List
The Susha historical and architectural reserve was added to Azerbaijan's Tentative List in 2022 (World Heritage Centre ref. 1574), covering the eighteenth-century fortress town, its walls and gates, mosques, mansions and mausolea. A full nomination dossier has been signalled for the World Heritage Committee in 2027. If it succeeds it would be the first inscription in the region.
Intangible heritage — Azerbaijan
Several traditions with deep Karabakh roots are inscribed under Azerbaijan: mugham (2008), the art of ashiq (2009), Novruz, carpet weaving — the Karabakh school being one of the seven classical Azerbaijani carpet groups — and chovqan, the mounted game played on Karabakh horses, listed as in need of urgent safeguarding.
Intangible heritage — Armenia
Armenia holds parallel inscriptions integral to Karabakh Armenian life, notably the duduk and lavash, along with the khachkar art of cross-stone carving. The khachkar inscription is the one that matters most here, because khachkars are the most numerous and the most vulnerable category of object in the landscape.
Endangered listings
Dadivank Monastery was named among Europa Nostra's 7 Most Endangered heritage sites in 2023, with the listing renewed in 2025. It is the highest-profile international flag planted on the heritage question and it has produced statements rather than access.
The mission that has not happened
UNESCO has repeatedly sought agreement for an independent mission to assess cultural property across the region. As of 2026 no such mission has been carried out, which is now nearly six years after the first transfers of territory.
The honest summary
This is a landscape of World Heritage quality with zero World Heritage protection, at precisely the moment when protection would matter most. Whatever happens to these buildings over the next decade will happen without international monitoring, and the record of what was here before will rest on satellite imagery and on photographs taken by people who can no longer return.
🔬 Fascinating Facts
Three languages in one name
Nagorno- is Russian, kara is Turkic, bagh is Persian. "Mountainous black garden" — a name in which no local language gets the last word.
1.5 million years of occupation
Azykh Cave has hominin layers reaching back up to 1.5 million years, making it one of the oldest known occupation sites in Eurasia.
Recognised by nobody
The Republic of Artsakh existed for 32 years and was recognised by zero UN member states — not even by Armenia, which funded, armed and defended it throughout.
Six days
Between 24 and 30 September 2023, 100,417 people left. It is one of the fastest complete depopulations of a territory in modern European history.
Twenty herbs in a flatbread
Jingalov hats can contain more than twenty distinct wild herbs, and the recipe changes every fortnight as the season turns — a dish that is literally a survey of what is growing that week.
The queen's stallion
The Karabakh horse is Azerbaijan's national animal and one of the oldest riding breeds in the world; a stallion was presented to Queen Elizabeth II in 1956.
A kilometre and five years apart
Shusha's Govhar Agha Mosque (1883) and Ghazanchetsots Cathedral (1888) stand about a kilometre apart and were built within five years of each other, by a town that then contained both congregations.
A vineyard carried out by hand
The Kataro winery's Khndoghni vines left as cuttings in 2020 and were replanted 200 km away in Armenia — an appellation evacuated in the boot of a car.
Three airports in four years
Fuzuli (2021), Zangilan (2022) and Lachin (2024) — more international airports than most countries of comparable size possess in total, in a region whose resident civilian population is around 30,000.
The monument still stands
Tatik-Papik, the 1967 sculpture that was the emblem of the vanished republic and appeared on its coat of arms, is still on the ridge above Khankendi.
⭐ Notable People
Uzeyir Hajibeyli (1885–1948)
Composer of Leyli and Majnun, the first opera in the Muslim world, and of Azerbaijan's national anthem. Shaped by the Shusha musical world, where mugham and Western form met in the same salons.
Bulbul (1897–1961)
Murtuza Mammadov, the great Azerbaijani tenor, born in Shusha. His house-museum there has been rebuilt; he also led the first systematic ethnomusicological recording of Azerbaijani folk music.
Khurshidbanu Natavan (1832–1897)
Daughter of the last Karabakh khan, poet of the classical ghazal tradition, and the patron who built Shusha's water supply. One of the very few nineteenth-century Caucasian women whose literary reputation survived on its own terms.
Molla Panah Vagif (1717–1797)
Poet and vizier of the Karabakh Khanate, credited with turning Azerbaijani poetry toward the vernacular. His hilltop mausoleum in Shusha, destroyed in 1991 and rebuilt in 2021, is a place of pilgrimage.
Hasan-Jalal Dawla (c. 1214–1261)
Prince of Khachen, builder of Gandzasar, and the founder of a dynasty that kept an Armenian polity alive in these valleys through the Mongol period.
Ivan Bagramyan (1897–1982)
Marshal of the Soviet Union, of Karabakh Armenian family, and one of the highest-ranking non-Slavs in the Red Army — commander of the 1st Baltic Front in 1944–45.
Zori Balayan (1935–2024)
Stepanakert-born writer and physician whose 1984 book Ochag helped ignite the Karabakh movement. A polarising figure whose work is read as foundational in Yerevan and as incitement in Baku.
Arayik Harutyunyan (b. 1973)
Last functioning president of Artsakh, in office 2020–2023. Detained in September 2023 and sentenced in Baku in January 2025 in proceedings closed to independent observers.
⚽ Sports — The Team Without a Home
Football carries the region's name further than anything else about it. Qarabag FK, founded in Aghdam in 1951, has played in exile in Baku since 1993 under the slogan "the team without a home" — a phrase that started as a statement of loss and has become, for its supporters, a statement of persistence.
The record
Azerbaijan's most successful club by a wide margin, with a long run of league titles and regular European campaigns — including a Champions League group stage in 2017–18. Those campaigns have made Aghdam a name known to football fans across Europe who could not place it on a map, which was substantially the point.
The return
The club has stated its intention to return to a rebuilt Imarat Stadium in Aghdam. It would be the first competitive football played in the city since 1993, and the fixture list on the day it happens will be the most politically loaded in Europe.
Chovqan
The Karabakh mounted game played on Karabakh horses, inscribed on UNESCO's list of intangible heritage in need of urgent safeguarding. Something between polo and a cavalry drill, with a distinct musical accompaniment. It is being actively revived as part of the cultural programme.
Jidir Duzu
The historic racing ground above the Shusha gorge has hosted equestrian displays since 2021. Horse racing on the plateau is attested for two and a half centuries and is the oldest continuously remembered sporting tradition in the region.
Wrestling and weightlifting
The Caucasian staples. Several Armenian Olympic wrestlers and weightlifters came from Karabakh families, and the sport remains central to the displaced communities in Armenia today.
What is gone
Artsakh had its own football federation and national team, playing in the unrecognised-states circuit, along with a modest league. All of it ceased in 2023. The stadium in Khankendi stands and is being renovated for a different set of teams.
📰 Media & Press Freedom
There is no independent local media in the region. Artsakh's outlets — Artsakhpress, Public Television of Artsakh — ceased operating in 2023, and their successors publish from Armenia. Coverage now originates either from Azerbaijani state and state-aligned media or from Armenian outlets writing from outside.
The Azerbaijani side
AzerTac, APA, Caliber.az, Report.az and the state broadcaster. Well-resourced, quick, and consistently accurate about what is being built and when. Read them for construction, investment, schedules and official positions, and read them knowing what they are.
The Armenian side
Armenpress, CivilNet, Hetq, Aravot and the Artsakh outlets in exile. Read them for the heritage question, the displaced communities and the legal cases. They have no access to the territory either, which they are generally honest about.
The press freedom picture
Azerbaijan ranks near the bottom of the RSF World Press Freedom Index. A wave of arrests of independent journalists from Abzas Media, Toplum TV and Meydan TV between 2023 and 2025 has left very little domestic independent reporting of any kind, on this subject or any other.
Access for foreign press
Foreign journalists can reach Karabakh only on accredited, escorted visits. Requests are granted selectively. Unaccompanied reporting is not possible, and reporting trips are organised around a fixed itinerary that everyone involved understands to be a fixed itinerary.
Where the middle is
International Crisis Group, Eurasianet, JAMnews, OC Media and Caucasus Heritage Watch for the satellite record. None of them is disinterested either, but they are transparent about method, which is the most that can be asked.
The practical advice
Triangulate. Read Azerbaijani state media for what is being built, Armenian media for what is being lost, and the middle group for the space between. No single source on this subject is disinterested, including, inevitably, this one.
🌐 Resources, Reading & Viewing
🔗 Official and monitoring
ASAN Visa
The official Azerbaijani e-visa portal. The only legitimate source for an e-visa; everything else charging a fee for it is a reseller.
ANAMA
Azerbaijan National Agency for Mine Action — clearance statistics, maps of certified areas and casualty figures.
UNESCO Tentative List
The "Susha historical and architectural reserve" file, ref. 1574 (2022).
Europa Nostra
The 7 Most Endangered listing for Dadivank (2023, renewed 2025).
Caucasus Heritage Watch
Cornell University. Published satellite monitoring reports on heritage sites across the region, with before-and-after imagery and stated methodology.
International Crisis Group
Sustained Armenia–Azerbaijan reporting, including the most useful available analysis of what the peace framework actually requires.
📚 Recommended reading
Thomas de Waal — Black Garden
Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War. The indispensable book on the conflict, revised across several editions, scrupulously even-handed and beautifully reported. If you read one thing, read this.
Thomas de Waal — The Caucasus: An Introduction
The best single-volume orientation to the whole region, and the fastest way to understand why the three South Caucasus countries behave as they do.
Laurence Broers — Armenia and Azerbaijan: Anatomy of a Rivalry
The sharpest modern political analysis, and the book that explains most clearly why the frozen conflict thawed when it did.
Philip Marsden — The Crossing Place
A classic of Armenian travel writing, reaching Karabakh at the very start of the first war. Worth reading for the landscape before any of this.
Robert Bevan — The Destruction of Memory
On architecture as a target of war. Essential context for the heritage argument, and applicable well beyond this region.
Vasily Grossman — An Armenian Sketchbook
Not about Karabakh, but the finest thing ever written about being a stranger among Armenians, and a corrective to every solemn account of the Caucasus including this one.
🎬 Viewing
Almost everything filmed on this subject is produced by one side or the other and should be watched in pairs. Search terms that return genuinely useful material: "Shusha Azerbaijan reconstruction documentary" · "Aghdam ghost city drone footage" · "Nagorno-Karabakh 2023 exodus BBC / Al Jazeera" · "Gandzasar Dadivank monastery Artsakh" · "Fuzuli airport Karabakh AZAL" · "Thomas de Waal Black Garden lecture" · "Kharibulbul festival Jidir Duzu" · "Janapar Trail Karabakh hiking" — the last of these is archival, and shows the landscape as it was walked before 2020.
🇨🇿 For Czech Readers
There is no Czech consular presence anywhere near this region and no direct route to it. Everything below assumes a departure from Prague and an arrival, at best, in Baku.
Getting there from Prague
No direct flights. The realistic routings to Baku (GYD) are via Istanbul with Turkish Airlines, via Vienna or Frankfurt, or via Dubai — roughly 7–11 hours in total. Return fares from Prague typically run 12,000–22,000 Kč. From Baku it is a further 70-minute AZAL flight to Fuzuli (about 1,900 Kč one way) or four to five hours by road.
Visa
Czech citizens need an Azerbaijani e-visa — US$25, about 560 Kč, 30 days single entry, issued in around three working days through the official ASAN Visa portal. It does not cover Karabakh. The separate regional permit has to be arranged by an accredited Azerbaijani operator or a business host, two to four weeks ahead.
MZV ČR
The Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs advises against travel to Nagorno-Karabakh and the adjacent districts. Check mzv.gov.cz before booking anything, because the advisory wording has changed several times since 2023 and travel insurance is written against the current text, not last year's.
DROZD
Register in the DROZD system (drozd.mzv.gov.cz) before you leave. This is free, takes five minutes, and is the only mechanism by which the Czech consular service would know you were in the region if something went wrong.
The embassy
The Czech Embassy in Baku (Velvyslanectví ČR v Baku) is the accredited mission for Azerbaijan. Four to five hours from the region by road. There is no honorary consul in the Karabakh region and there will not be one.
Money and insurance
1 AZN is roughly 13–14 Kč. Budget 4,000–8,000 Kč per person per day for an organised permit tour, on top of flights — there is no cheaper tier. Standard Czech travel policies (Allianz, ČSOB, Generáli) exclude territories under a Level 4 advisory; get written confirmation of cover including medical evacuation, or accept that you are travelling uninsured.
A note on the Armenian route: a number of Czech travellers visited Stepanakert from Yerevan between 2015 and 2020, when it was straightforward and legal from the Armenian side. If you were one of them, you are on the Azerbaijani blacklist, that list is public and searchable, and applying for an Azerbaijani visa now carries a real risk of refusal or detention on arrival. Take legal advice before you apply, not afterwards.
📸 Photo Gallery
This page carries no photographs, and that is a deliberate statement of fact rather than an oversight.
What the archive holds
An authoritative listing of the image store on 14 September 2026 returned zero files for this entry under every plausible name — nagorno-karabakh, artsakh, karabakh, stepanakert — and a full sweep of the keyspace for Shusha, Gandzasar, Dadivank, Amaras, Lachin, Aghdam, Fuzuli, Zangilan, Kalbajar and Jidir Duzu found nothing either. There is no picture of this place in this collection.
Why nothing was borrowed
It would have been easy to reach into the Armenia or Azerbaijan folders for a mountain. Two candidates were downloaded and examined, and both turned out to be generic synthetic landscapes that do not depict the places their filenames claim. Putting one of those at the top of this page would have been a second misattribution stacked on a first, on the one entry in this factbook where attribution is the entire subject.
Why it is hard to do honestly
Nagorno-Karabakh is one of the hardest places in the world to photograph responsibly right now. Photography from before 2023 shows a population that is no longer there. Photography from after 2023 is almost entirely produced on escorted programmes, along fixed itineraries, of things chosen to be shown. Neither is neutral, and a caption cannot fix that on its own.
If you have your own
If you have travelled here on an authorised programme and hold your own photographs — or if you left in 2023 and have pictures of what was here — this project would be glad to hear from you at photos@kaufmann.wtf. Both sets belong on this page, side by side and dated.
✍️ Author's Note
I have written two hundred and seventy-odd of these entries and this is the only one where I had to decide what tense to use.
In 2017 I sat on a balcony in Stepanakert with a woman called Anna, who taught chemistry and made the best coffee I have ever been handed in a chipped cup. It was late September. Her building looked north toward the ridge where the two stone heads sit, and she told me that when the wind came from the right direction on a Sunday you could hear the bells at Gandzasar, thirty kilometres away — which I did not believe and still do not, but I have never wanted to check. She asked what I did. I said I wrote travel guides. She laughed and said: write that we have very good wine and very bad roads, and that we are still here.
In September 2023 she was in the queue on the Lachin road, in a car with her sister and two suitcases and a cat, for twenty-eight hours. She lives in Yerevan now. She still teaches chemistry. The coffee, she says, is not the same, and I think she means several things by that.
So: how do you write a travel guide to a place that has been emptied of the people who taught you to love it, and refilled with other people who were themselves emptied out of it thirty years earlier, and who are not villains in this story either, and whose grandmothers also had balconies here? I do not have a clean answer. What I have decided is that the dishonest options are worse. Pretending Artsakh never existed is a lie. Pretending the families now moving into Khankendi are an occupation and not a return is also a lie, or at least half of one. Both things are true and they are true at the same time, which is the condition of almost everywhere in the Caucasus and most of the world besides.
What I would ask, if you ever do stand on the Jidir Duzu with the gorge falling away under you and the whole green weight of those mountains in front of you, is a small thing. There are inscriptions cut into stone all over this region — on church walls, on cross-stones lying in the grass, on lintels in villages that no longer have that name. Some of them are being restored. Some of them are being quietly removed. If you find one, read it aloud. It does not matter that you cannot understand it. It does not matter that you will get the sounds wrong. The stones have gone very quiet, and they were cut by people who expected to be read.
Anna, if this ever reaches you: very good wine, very bad roads. I wrote it down.
— Radim Kaufmann, 2026
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