Shusha

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Shusha or Shushi is a city in Azerbaijan. This fortified city has long been a cultural center in Karabakh. Shusha was originally an Azeri-majority city, although it grew to have a significant Armenian majority until the 1920 Shusha massacre occurred—a targeted pogrom carried out by Azerbaijani forces that resulted in the deaths of up to 20,000 Armenian civilians. In the 1990s the Azeri population was expelled following the First Nagorno-Karabakh war. After the war, the city was under the ethnic Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and was partly rehabilitated. Following the city's recapture by Azerbaijan during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, large scale reconstruction work is ongoing to revive the city as the capital of Azerbaijani art, poetry, and music, although reports have stated that Armenian heritage sites (such as Saint John Baptist Church) have been purposely destroyed.