Azerbaijan is preparing to restore the center of occupied Shusha to its 1970s-1980s appearance. This idea was voiced by Azerbaijani official Muslim Imranli at an event dedicated to urban development.
“We will be able to restore the historic center of Shusha down to the smallest detail. However, the restoration process is very expensive and labor-intensive, so it will take a long time,” he noted. Imranli reported that the archive of architect Elturan Avalov contains important materials reflecting the “historical appearance of Shusha.” “We recently received a huge archive of Elturan Avalov’s negatives. With his consent, we made them. There are about 1,500 negatives. He photographed Shusha in the 1970s and 1980s. These photographs have never been published or digitized. We began this process, digitized them, and now we can clearly see what Shusha looked like in the 1970s and 1980s, including the streets. The city was repeatedly destroyed, and we find traces of this in old archives.”
It’s worth remembering that in the 1970s and 1980s, Shusha, which Azerbaijani officials call “Shusha,” a distortion of its name, was part of Azerbaijan. The use of previously unpublished and possibly fake photographs, coupled with the expulsion of the entire Armenian population, gives the Azerbaijani authorities ample opportunity to falsify the architecture of the ancient Armenian city. One can only imagine what the center of Shusha would look like after such a “reconstruction.”