Nagorno-Karabakh
Artsakh · Dagliq Qarabag · The Mountainous Black Garden
The only entry in this factbook whose subject is a state that no longer 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.
⚠️ 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 seven 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.
Three specific risks compound one another. Landmines and unexploded ordnance are the largest: ANAMA, the Azerbaijani mine action agency, has cleared large areas but estimates the work will continue past 2030, and civilian casualties still occur. Legal exposure is the second: Azerbaijani law criminalises entry into these territories without state authorisation, and anyone who previously visited via Armenia is on a published blacklist and will be refused entry to Azerbaijan or detained. Symbolic risk is the third: Artsakh flags, insignia, maps or Armenian-language advocacy material found on a phone or in luggage will end a trip badly.
Independent travel is not possible. Access is by state-authorised tour, business invitation or accredited press visit only.
Nagorno-Karabakh at a Glance
| Current status | Karabakh Economic Region, Republic of Azerbaijan |
| Former status | Republic of Artsakh (1991–2023), unrecognised; dissolved 1 Jan 2024 |
| Administrative centre | Khankendi (Armenian: Stepanakert) |
| Cultural capital | Shusha (Armenian: Shushi) |
| Area | ~4,400 km² (former NKAO); ~11,500 km² with surrounding districts |
| Population | ~30,300 resettled civilians (Mar 2026); 80,000–85,000 incl. workers |
| Pre-2023 population | ~120,000, overwhelmingly Armenian |
| Languages | Azerbaijani (official); Russian widely understood |
| Currency | Azerbaijani manat (AZN) |
| Highest point | Mount Gyamysh / Gomshasar (3,724 m) |
| Airports | Fuzuli (FZL), Zangilan (ZZN), Lachin (LLN) |
| UNESCO World Heritage | 0 inscribed (Shusha on Azerbaijan’s Tentative List, 2022) |
| Entry | Azerbaijani visa + separate state permit; organised visits only |
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.
Nagorno-Karabakh is 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. Azerbaijani renders it Dagliq Qarabag, the same meaning in a different grammar.
Artsakh is 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.
The settlements carry the same doubling. The administrative centre is Khankendi ("the khan’s village") in Azerbaijani and Stepanakert in Armenian — the latter a Soviet coinage of 1923 honouring the Bolshevik Stepan Shaumian. The plateau town is Shusha or Shushi, differing by one vowel and several centuries of grievance. Aghdara/Martakert, Khojavend/Martuni, Aghdam, Lachin/Berdzor: in each pair, the map you are holding tells someone where you got it.
This factbook uses the current official Azerbaijani names for present-day places, with Armenian names given alongside on first use, because both are needed to read the landscape and the literature honestly.
Nagorno-Karabakh occupies the eastern flank of the Lesser Caucasus, where the Armenian highland plateau buckles and drops toward the Kur-Araz lowlands. It is a region built entirely of edges. The Karabakh Range runs northwest to southeast, 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. Roughly a third of the territory is forested — unusually high for the South Caucasus — and the mountain forests shelter Caucasian red deer, brown bear, lynx, wild boar and the critically endangered Caucasian leopard, of which a handful of individuals have been camera-trapped in the border ranges.
Water defines settlement. 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 rivers 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 — is the single most consequential piece of geography in the modern history of the region. It is roughly ten kilometres wide at its narrowest and it determined, more than any battlefield, who could hold the highlands and for how long.
Two geological curiosities deserve mention. The Azykh Cave in the Khojavend district is one of the oldest known hominin sites in Eurasia, with occupation layers running back some 700,000 to 1.5 million years. And the plateau on which Shusha stands is a natural fortress: a limestone table ringed on three sides by cliffs falling 300 metres into the Karkar gorge, which is precisely why an eighteenth-century khan built his capital on top of it.
Khankendi 39.8203°N, 46.7656°E. Markers show the administrative centre, Shusha, Aghdam, the Lachin corridor and the principal monasteries. Boundaries on base tiles are rendered by OpenStreetMap and do not represent an editorial position.
Antiquity. Artsakh appears as the tenth province of Greater Armenia under the Artaxiad and Arsacid dynasties. After Armenia’s conversion in the early fourth century the region became densely monastic, and the princely house of Khachen — whose ruler Hasan-Jalal Dawla built Gandzasar in the thirteenth century — maintained a semi-autonomous Armenian polity through waves of Arab, Seljuk, Mongol and Persian overlordship.
The khanate. In 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 music and of a mixed Armenian-Azerbaijani urban elite. The Treaty of Gulistan transferred the khanate to the Russian Empire in 1813.
Imperial collapse. 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. In 1921 the Soviet Caucasian Bureau assigned the mountainous portion to Soviet Azerbaijan, creating in 1923 the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast: an Armenian-majority enclave inside another republic, connected to Armenia by nothing. Every subsequent war traces back to that administrative decision.
First war, 1988–1994. In February 1988 the NKAO legislature voted to transfer to Armenia. Pogroms in Sumgait and Baku and expulsions in both directions followed. As the USSR dissolved, the vote became a war. By the 1994 Bishkek ceasefire, Armenian forces held not only the former oblast but seven adjacent Azerbaijani districts as a buffer — roughly 14% of Azerbaijan’s internationally recognised territory. Around 30,000 died and roughly 700,000 Azerbaijanis and 350,000 Armenians were displaced. Aghdam, a city of some 40,000, was emptied and systematically stripped.
Frozen, then not. Nearly three decades of OSCE Minsk Group mediation produced no settlement while Azerbaijan’s oil revenues rebuilt its army. On 27 September 2020 the Second Karabakh War began. Forty-four days of drone-led operations — Turkish Bayraktar TB2s and Israeli loitering munitions against Soviet-era air defences — ended with the fall of Shusha on 8 November and a Russian-brokered ceasefire on 10 November 2020. Azerbaijan recovered the seven districts and roughly a third of the former oblast. Around 2,000 Russian peacekeepers deployed along the Lachin corridor.
The blockade and the end. In December 2022 the Lachin corridor was closed by protesters and then by an Azerbaijani checkpoint. For nine months some 120,000 people lived under shortages of food, fuel and medicine. On 19 September 2023 Azerbaijan launched what it called an anti-terror operation; the Artsakh forces capitulated the next day. Between 24 and 30 September, 100,417 of roughly 101,000 remaining Armenians crossed into Armenia. President Samvel Shahramanyan signed the dissolution decree on 28 September 2023, effective 1 January 2024.
Aftermath, 2024–2026. Russian peacekeepers withdrew ahead of schedule in April 2024. In January 2025 six former Artsakh leaders, including ex-president Arayik Harutyunyan and the businessman Ruben Vardanyan, received long sentences in Baku. On 8 August 2025 Ilham Aliyev and Nikol Pashinyan signed a joint peace declaration at the White House — a political framework rather than a final treaty. Karabakh University reopened in Khankendi on 16 September 2025 with some 2,440 students. The last eleven Armenians in the region, elderly residents of a Khankendi care home, were transferred to Armenia on 23 January 2026.
As of mid-2026 the peace agreement has been initialled but not signed. Baku requires Armenia to amend constitutional language it reads as a territorial claim; that change needs a referendum, currently expected in 2027, after Armenian parliamentary elections held on 7 June 2026. The war is over. The treaty is not.
Nagorno-Karabakh is the rare place where a travel writer must describe two cultures in two 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. The living community is now in Armenia — some 100,000 people spread through Yerevan, Kotayk and Syunik, many still identifying by the village they left.
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 inscribed on UNESCO’s intangible heritage list, and the birthplace of composers Uzeyir Hajibeyli and Bulbul. 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 on the plateau. Karabakh horses, a distinct golden-chestnut mountain breed, appear on stamps, banknotes and in every tourism campaign.
The present. By March 2026 some 7,541 families — about 30,261 people — had been resettled into 41 rebuilt settlements under the state’s "Great Return" programme, with total presence including construction crews, seconded public workers and police estimated at 80,000–85,000. The declared target of 140,000 by the end of 2026 will not be met; analysts expect roughly 60,000 civilians by year-end. Around 105 families live in Shusha. In August 2026 another convoy of 22 families, 102 people, arrived in Khankendi.
The texture of daily life reflects that. These are 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. It will be a decade before anyone can describe a settled contemporary culture here rather than a policy in progress.
Heritage under dispute. Independent monitors — notably Caucasus Heritage Watch at Cornell and the Armenian-run Monument Watch — have used satellite imagery to document the destruction or alteration of more than a hundred Armenian heritage structures between November 2020 and 2025, including cemeteries and village churches. Azerbaijan rejects the framing and describes its work as restoration, in several cases advancing the position that medieval churches in the region are Caucasian Albanian rather than Armenian — a claim the great majority of non-Azerbaijani specialists reject. 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.
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. Karabakh University opened in the former Artsakh State University buildings on 16 September 2025 with around 2,440 students across faculties of engineering, agriculture, education and philology — deliberately positioned as the anchor institution of the resettlement. The Karabakh Marriott Khankendi, a 152-room four-star property, opened in December 2025 and is the region’s first international-brand hotel.
The most photographed object nearby is 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, appearing on its coat of arms, and it still stands. It has not been removed, and what to do with it is one of the quiet open questions of the reconstruction.
Visitors on organised programmes are typically shown the university, the renovated central square, a resettlement micro-district such as Karkijahan, and the panorama from the Shusha road. Independent wandering is not permitted.
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 where Azerbaijani mugham took its classical form. The twin-minaret Yukhari Govhar Agha Mosque (1883) and the Armenian Ghazanchetsots Cathedral (1888), whose white limestone dome is visible from most of the plateau, stand roughly a kilometre apart and between them summarise everything about the town. Both have been restored in the current programme; the cathedral’s restoration, which included removing later Armenian additions to the dome, has been contested by Armenian heritage bodies.
Shusha was 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, and was submitted to UNESCO’s Tentative List in 2022 as the "Susha historical and architectural reserve", with a full nomination dossier targeted at the World Heritage Committee for 2027. Reconstruction has been intense: the Jidir Duzu plain above the gorge hosts the annual Kharibulbul festival, the House-Museum of the poet Molla Panah Vagif and his hilltop mausoleum have been rebuilt, and the Bulbul and Hajibeyli house-museums have reopened.
Roughly 105 families — about 406 people — had resettled in Shusha by spring 2026. On a weekday the town can feel like a beautifully restored film set waiting for its extras. On festival weekends it is genuinely full.
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.
One structure survived largely intact: the Juma Mosque of 1868–70, built by the architect Karbalayi Safikhan Karabakhi, its twin minarets standing over an otherwise erased skyline. During the occupation years the mosque was used to stable livestock. It has now been fully restored and is the symbolic centre of the new city.
Azerbaijan is rebuilding Aghdam from nothing on a master plan for an eventual 100,000 residents, with an industrial park, a "smart city" utilities design and a preserved memorial zone of ruins retained deliberately as a monument. The Aghdam–Khankendi railway, a 110-kilometre standard-gauge line 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.
Aghdam is also the easiest part of the region to visit, being lowland, largely demined along the main axes, and close to Fuzuli airport — which is why almost every official delegation is taken there first.
The monastic architecture of these mountains is world-class and it is the reason art historians have argued about this region for two centuries.
Gandzasar ("treasure mountain") stands 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. It remains structurally intact and is currently inaccessible to independent visitors.
Dadivank, in the Kalbajar district, is 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. When Kalbajar transferred to Azerbaijani control in November 2020 the site’s fate drew international attention; it was listed by Europa Nostra among Europe’s 7 Most Endangered heritage sites in 2023, with the listing renewed in 2025.
Amaras, in the Khojavend district, is the oldest foundation 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 makes Amaras a site of considerable emotional weight for Armenians well beyond Karabakh.
Also of note: the Yeghishe Arakyal monastery near Mataghis, the fortress-monastery of Handaberd, and the Azykh Cave in Khojavend, whose Lower Palaeolithic layers make it one of the oldest hominin sites in Eurasia.
None of these are currently open to general tourism. Their inclusion here is descriptive, not an itinerary.
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.
A new alignment bypassing Lachin town opened in 2022, and the town itself was handed to Azerbaijan in August 2022. Lachin has since been rebuilt as a resettlement centre with its own international airport (LLN), opened in 2024 — the third built in the region in four years.
North of the corridor, Kalbajar is the wildest district: high alpine country between the Murovdag range and the Armenian border, with hot mineral springs at Istisu that supported a Soviet sanatorium industry, gold deposits at Soyudlu, and the Tartar gorge cutting through it. It is also the least demined and the most emphatically closed. Kalbajar contains Dadivank and the region’s highest passes, and for the foreseeable future the honest advice about it is simply: not yet.
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 Signature Dish
The one genuinely Karabakh dish. A thin flatbread packed with as many wild greens as the cook can gather — traditionally between seven and twenty different herbs.
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; 2 tbsp sunflower oil; salt; a pinch of chilli.
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 20 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, with cold ayran.
Kaufmann note: the greens should look like far too much. If the parcel is easy to seal you have used too few.
🍲 Karabakh Basdirma Plov
The festive rice dish. The Karabakh version is defined by its gazmag — the golden crust of dough or yoghurt-batter at the base of the pot.
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 chestnuts (peeled), 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, pinch of salt.
Method: Soak the rice in salted water 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 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 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.
🍞 Zhengyalov-adjacent staples worth knowing
Kyata / Gata — a layered sweet bread with a filling of flour, butter and sugar worked to a sandy crumb, baked until deep gold. Every household claims a different lamination.
Khorovats / Kabab — skewered lamb or pork over vine cuttings, salted only, served on lavash with grilled aubergine, pepper and tomato slipped from their skins.
Tutu / mulberry everything — the region is mulberry country. The fruit becomes syrup (doshab), leather, vodka and a thick sweet paste eaten with walnuts.
Zhingal soups — sour spring soups built on sorrel and yoghurt, thickened with an egg tempered in slowly so it does not split.
Motal — sharp sheep’s-milk cheese aged in a skin bag, powerfully pungent, traditionally broken into cold buttermilk.
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. In the Soviet period the region carried up to 18,200 hectares of vineyard and produced industrial volumes of blending wine; by the 2010s a serious small-batch revival was underway, with the Kataro winery at Togh — founded in a village house in 2010 — producing perhaps 100,000 bottles a year and winning international medals.
Togh fell within the territory transferred in November 2020. The Kataro family relocated to Yeghegnadzor in Armenia’s Vayots Dzor, taking cuttings, and now bottles Khndoghni from vines planted outside Karabakh under the name Vine of Artsakh. Pre-2020 vintages made from Togh fruit are now finite and collectable. Meanwhile Azerbaijan has begun replanting commercial vineyards in the Khojavend and Jabrayil districts, though nothing of consequence has yet been bottled from them.
Spirits. Artsakh Brandy Company at Askeran produced grape and mulberry distillates that were a household name across the Caucasus; legacy stock still circulates. Tutovka — mulberry oghi, usually 50–60% ABV, distilled twice from fermented white mulberries — is the true spirit of these mountains, floral and 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.
Non-alcoholic. Armenian-style black tea with mountain thyme; Azerbaijani tea served 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
| 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
There is no cocktail tradition in these mountains — spirits are drunk neat, at room temperature, with a toast and a piece of bread. 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.
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.
Altitude does everything. Khankendi at 850 m has warm, dry summers (26–30°C in July) and cold, snowy winters dipping below −5°C. Shusha at 1,500 m runs six to eight degrees cooler year-round and was historically an Imperial Russian summer hill station for exactly that reason. The Aghdam and Fuzuli lowlands are properly hot — 35°C and humid in midsummer. Kalbajar’s high passes hold snow into June.
May and early June are the best window: alpine flowers, the Kharibulbul festival on the Jidir Duzu plain, green forest and comfortable temperatures at all elevations. September and October are the second choice — grape and mulberry harvest, clear light, spectacular beech and hornbeam colour through the Tartar gorge. July and August are fine on the plateau and unpleasant on the plain. November to March is cold, frequently snowbound above 1,200 m, and access to the region is at its most restricted.
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. All access is from within Azerbaijan, with state authorisation.
By air. Three airports have been built in four years. Fuzuli International (FZL), opened October 2021, is the main gateway and serves Aghdam, Khojavend and the Shusha approach. AZAL operates scheduled domestic flights from Baku — typically twice weekly, Wednesday and Saturday, with one-way fares around AZN 78 (roughly $46) and a flight time near 70 minutes. Zangilan International (ZZN), opened October 2022, serves East Zangezur and the Araz valley. Lachin International (LLN) opened in 2024 and serves the corridor towns. Schedules are thin and change often; charter and delegation traffic outnumbers scheduled service.
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 and 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, 110 km of standard gauge climbing into the highlands, reached structural completion in spring 2026; passenger service had not commenced as of this writing but is the declared intention.
Permits. An Azerbaijani e-visa (US$25, 30 days, issued in about three working days via the ASAN Visa portal) covers entry to the country but not to the Karabakh Economic Region. A separate authorisation is required, arranged in practice through an accredited Azerbaijani tour operator, a business host, or — for journalists — the State Committee. Applications typically want passport details, itinerary and purpose two to four weeks ahead.
🛂 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 an Armenian entry stamp into the former NKAO in their history should assume they are on the blacklist and seek advice before applying.
💰 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 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.
⚕️ 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 your policy does not void cover for territories under a Level 4 advisory — many do. Tap water in rebuilt settlements is treated; elsewhere, do not.
💣 Landmines — read this twice
This is the single most important practical fact on the page. ANAMA has cleared substantial areas but the contaminated zone is measured in hundreds of square kilometres and clearance is projected to continue past 2030. Casualties continue to occur, including among construction workers and returning residents. Never leave a paved surface. Not for a photograph, not for a wildflower, not to reach a church you can see from the road. Red-and-white markers mean exactly what they appear to mean, and unmarked ground is not therefore safe.
🔑 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. Political conversation about the events of 2020 and 2023 will find you whether you seek it or not; listening is more useful than arguing, and remember that everyone you meet in a resettlement district was themselves displaced in the 1990s.
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.
| Bottle of water | 0.60 AZN (~$0.35) |
| Tea in an armudu glass | 1–2 AZN (~$0.60–1.20) |
| Local meal, simple canteen | 8–15 AZN (~$5–9) |
| Dinner, hotel restaurant | 35–60 AZN (~$20–35) |
| Guesthouse / small hotel night | 60–110 AZN (~$35–65) |
| Karabakh Marriott Khankendi, night | 190–320 AZN (~$110–190) |
| Baku–Fuzuli flight, one way | 78 AZN (~$46) |
| Car with driver, per day | 120–200 AZN (~$70–120) |
| Organised multi-day permit tour | $180–350 per person per day |
Budget travel is not a realistic proposition here. The permit requirement makes the guided tour the floor price, not a luxury option.
Karabakh Marriott Khankendi — 152 rooms, four-star, opened December 2025; the region’s only international-brand property and the default for business and delegation visits.
Shusha — several restored boutique guesthouses and the rebuilt hotel stock around the central square, small and often block-booked during festival season.
Aghdam and Fuzuli — new mid-range business hotels serving the airport and the construction economy; functional rather than charming.
Lachin — a handful of new guesthouses aimed at the airport and the corridor road.
Kalbajar — the Istisu spa complex is under redevelopment; nothing yet open to general visitors.
Booking is almost always done by the operator holding your permit rather than directly, and walk-in accommodation is not a thing that exists here.
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.
Vagif Poetry Days — late August/September in Shusha, honouring Molla Panah Vagif at his rebuilt mausoleum; also revived in 2021.
Novruz — 20–21 March, the pre-Islamic spring new year, marked with bonfires, semeni wheatgrass, sweets and public celebration in every resettled town.
8 November — Victory Day — the national commemoration of the fall of Shusha in 2020; heavily observed here, and a date on which a foreign visitor should be conscious of their own presence.
Aghdam Juma Mosque commemorations and a growing calendar of resettlement-anniversary events.
Historically, Armenian Karabakh observed the Zhengyalov Hats festival at Togh and Vardavar in July; these continue in the diaspora communities of Armenia rather than in the region.
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.
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. Several traditions with deep Karabakh roots are inscribed on UNESCO’s intangible lists under Azerbaijan, notably Azerbaijani mugham (2008), the art of ashiq (2009), Novruz, and carpet weaving — the Karabakh school being one of the seven classical Azerbaijani carpet groups. Armenia holds parallel inscriptions including the duduk and lavash, both integral to Karabakh Armenian life.
Endangered listings. Dadivank Monastery was named among Europa Nostra’s 7 Most Endangered heritage sites in 2023, with the listing renewed in 2025. 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. Caucasus Heritage Watch and Monument Watch have published satellite documentation of over a hundred damaged, altered or destroyed Armenian sites since November 2020. Azerbaijan disputes their methodology and characterises its interventions as restoration.
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.
Jidir Duzu — the "plain of horse races" on the lip of the Shusha gorge. Empty, enormous, and the finest viewpoint in the region.
Azykh Cave — Khojavend district. Lower Palaeolithic layers up to 1.5 million years old; among the earliest hominin sites in Eurasia and almost unvisited.
The Tartar (Terter) gorge — the road north from Sarsang reservoir cuts through vertical rock for kilometres. Formerly the spine of the Janapar hiking trail.
Sarsang Reservoir — a 125 m Soviet dam in a forested bowl; the most photogenic piece of infrastructure in the Caucasus.
Istisu hot springs, Kalbajar — carbonated mineral water at 60°C emerging in an alpine valley, once bottled across the USSR.
Khudavang and the Handaberd fortress — ruined mountain strongholds swallowed by beech forest.
The Aghdam memorial ruins — the deliberately preserved zone of roofless housing blocks beside the restored Juma Mosque. Not a gem in any comfortable sense, but the single most eloquent square kilometre in the South Caucasus.
Access reality check: of the seven above, only Jidir Duzu and the Aghdam memorial zone are realistically visitable in 2026 on a standard authorised programme.
Layers, because you will move through 1,000 metres of altitude in an afternoon. Proper walking boots with ankle support — rebuilt towns have new pavements, everywhere else is rubble and rough track. A windproof shell for the plateau, which is exposed year-round. Sun protection at altitude. A power bank, since charging opportunities are unpredictable outside hotels. Cash in manat in small denominations. 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. And leave behind anything — a flag pin, an old map, a book jacket — that depicts this region as an independent state.
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.
Thomas de Waal, The Caucasus: An Introduction — the best single-volume orientation to the whole region.
Philip Marsden, The Crossing Place — a classic of Armenian travel writing, reaching Karabakh at the very start of the first war.
Laurence Broers, Armenia and Azerbaijan: Anatomy of a Rivalry — the sharpest modern political analysis.
Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory — on architecture as a target of war; essential context for the heritage argument.
Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook — not about Karabakh, but the finest thing ever written about being a stranger among Armenians.
Search terms that return genuinely useful material, with the caveat that almost everything on this subject is produced by one side or the other and should be watched in pairs:
• "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" — archival, for the landscape as it was walked before 2020.
• The name is three languages deep: Russian nagorny, Turkic kara, Persian bagh — "mountainous black garden".
• Azykh Cave has hominin occupation layers up to 1.5 million years old, making it one of the oldest known sites in Eurasia.
• The Republic of Artsakh existed for 32 years and was recognised by zero UN member states — not even Armenia.
• 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.
• Jingalov hats can contain more than twenty distinct wild herbs, and the recipe changes every fortnight as the season turns.
• 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.
• Shusha’s mosque and cathedral stand about a kilometre apart and were built five years apart, in 1883 and 1888.
• The Kataro winery’s Khndoghni vines were physically carried out as cuttings in 2020 and replanted 200 km away in Armenia.
• Three international airports have been built in the region since 2021 — more than most countries of comparable size possess in total.
• The Tatik-Papik monument, emblem of the vanished republic, is still standing on the ridge above Khankendi.
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.
Bulbul (Murtuza Mammadov, 1897–1961) — the great Azerbaijani tenor, born in Shusha; his house-museum there has been rebuilt.
Khurshidbanu Natavan (1832–1897) — daughter of the last Karabakh khan, poet, and the patron who built Shusha’s water supply.
Molla Panah Vagif (1717–1797) — poet and vizier of the Karabakh Khanate; his hilltop mausoleum is a place of pilgrimage.
Hasan-Jalal Dawla (c.1214–1261) — prince of Khachen, builder of Gandzasar.
Ivan Bagramyan (1897–1982) — Marshal of the Soviet Union, of Karabakh Armenian family.
Zori Balayan (1935–2024) — Stepanakert-born writer whose 1984 book Ochag helped ignite the Karabakh movement.
Arayik Harutyunyan (b. 1973) — last functioning president of Artsakh; sentenced in Baku in January 2025.
Football carries the region’s name further than anything else. Qarabag FK, founded in Aghdam in 1951, has played in exile in Baku since 1993, using the slogan "the team without a home". It is Azerbaijan’s most successful club by a wide margin and its regular European campaigns — including a Champions League group stage in 2017–18 — have made Aghdam a name known to football fans who could not place it on a map. The club has stated its intention to return to a rebuilt Imarat Stadium in Aghdam.
Traditional sport centres on horses: chovqan, the Karabakh mounted game played on Karabakh horses, is inscribed on UNESCO’s list of intangible heritage in need of urgent safeguarding. The Jidir Duzu plain above Shusha was the historic racing ground and has hosted equestrian displays since 2021. Wrestling and, at altitude, distance running round out the picture; several Armenian Olympic wrestlers and weightlifters came from Karabakh families.
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 (AzerTac, APA, Caliber.az, Report.az) or from Armenian outlets writing from outside.
Azerbaijan ranks near the bottom of the RSF World Press Freedom Index, and 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. Foreign journalists can reach Karabakh only on accredited, escorted visits; requests are granted selectively and unaccompanied reporting is not possible.
For readers trying to form an accurate picture, the practical advice is to triangulate: read Azerbaijani state media for what is being built, Armenian media for what is being lost, and Crisis Group, Eurasianet, JAMnews and OC Media for the space in between. No single source on this subject is disinterested, including, inevitably, this one.
Photography for this entry is being sourced.
Nagorno-Karabakh is one of the hardest places in the world to photograph responsibly right now, and this factbook would rather publish nothing than publish images that misrepresent whose landscape this was and is. If you have travelled here on an authorised programme and hold your own photographs, the project would be glad to hear from you at photos@kaufmann.wtf.
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 a 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
