Aghdam, Azerbaijan: The City Destroyed and Looted in the Karabakh War

Summary

Aghdam was an Azerbaijani city on the edge of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, a regional administrative and commercial center whose name means roughly "white roof" or "white house" in Azerbaijani. Founded in the mid-eighteenth century by Panah Ali Khan Javanshir and granted city status in 1828 after the Russian conquest, it grew into a substantial town — the 1989 Soviet census recorded 28,031 inhabitants, nearly all of them Azerbaijanis — serving the surrounding agricultural district with markets, schools, butter, wine and brandy factories, and the landmark Juma (Friday) Mosque built in 1868 to designs by architect Karbalayi Safikhan Karabakhi.

During the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, Armenian forces captured Aghdam at the Battle of Aghdam on July 23, 1993, and the city's entire population fled. What followed was not destruction by battle but destruction by abandonment and plunder: over years of occupation the empty city was systematically stripped, its buildings dismantled for bricks, timber, metal, and stone, until only ruins remained. The devastation was so total that Aghdam became known as the "Hiroshima of the Caucasus," with the surviving mosque standing almost alone amid a field of rubble.

For more than a quarter of a century Aghdam lay within territory controlled by the self-declared Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, a ghost city in a buffer zone. Its mosque, one of the few structures left standing, was reportedly used during the occupation to keep cattle and pigs — a desecration that became a symbol of the conflict's bitterness. The displaced residents of Aghdam joined the broader population of internally displaced Azerbaijanis who waited decades for a return.

Under the ceasefire that ended the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, the Aghdam District was handed back to Azerbaijan on November 20, 2020. Azerbaijan has since begun an ambitious reconstruction, restoring the Juma Mosque, opening the area to visitors, and launching plans to rebuild Aghdam as a modern "smart city" with new industrial and residential development — a return that, however, cannot instantly restore the community scattered nearly three decades earlier.

Timeline

Before It Was Erased

Before the war, Aghdam was a thriving regional center just east of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, roughly 30 kilometres northeast of Stepanakert. Its tens of thousands of residents, almost all Azerbaijanis, supported a busy economy of markets, workshops, schools, and a notable brandy and cognac industry, while the surrounding district supplied grain, cotton, and livestock. The city anchored daily life for the wider rural population that came to trade, study, and worship there.

The city's most striking landmark was the Juma Mosque, a two-minaret Friday mosque built in 1868 by the prominent Karabakh architect Karbalayi Safikhan Karabakhi. Around it spread a fabric of homes, public buildings, a tea-house culture, and a cemetery and mausoleum complex that reflected generations of settled community life. Aghdam was, in short, an ordinary functioning city rather than a fortress or front-line outpost.

That ordinariness is part of what makes its fate so striking. Aghdam was not bombed flat in a single battle; it was a living place that, once emptied of its people, was dismantled piece by piece over years — a city erased less by explosives than by abandonment and the slow stripping of everything that could be carried away. Old photographs and the memories of its former residents record a city of shaded streets, busy bazaars, and a famous bread museum, a place whose name was known across Soviet Azerbaijan for its cognac and its hospitality before it became known across the world as a synonym for ruin.

The Decision

Aghdam's destruction was set in motion by its capture during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. At the Battle of Aghdam on July 23, 1993, Armenian forces took the city, and its population — caught in the wider displacement of Azerbaijanis from the Karabakh region — fled en masse, leaving the city almost entirely empty. The seizure placed Aghdam inside territory that would be held for decades by the self-declared Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.

With the city emptied and lying in a buffer zone between the warring sides, its ruin was driven by two overlapping forces. One was strategic: razing structures helped deny the city's reuse as a staging area or shelter. The other was attritional looting: over years of occupation, the abandoned buildings were treated as a free quarry, dismantled for bricks, timber, metal, and stone that were carried off and reused elsewhere. There was no single demolition order — rather a prolonged, unsupervised stripping that hollowed the city out.

The result was an almost total erasure of the urban fabric while the people remained displaced far away. The Juma Mosque survived largely because of its size and construction, standing as a stark marker amid the rubble; reports that cattle and pigs were kept inside it during the occupation deepened the sense of deliberate humiliation. The reversal came only with the 2020 war, whose ceasefire returned the Aghdam District to Azerbaijan on November 20, 2020.

Contributing Factors

What's There Now

Aghdam today is a city in the early stages of rebirth after near-total destruction. When Azerbaijan regained control in November 2020, it inherited a vast field of rubble dominated by the surviving Juma Mosque, which has since been restored as a symbol of return. The contrast between the intact mosque and the leveled streets around it remains the defining image of the city's fate.

Azerbaijan has launched an ambitious reconstruction program, announcing the Aghdam Industrial Park in 2021, reopening the area to visitors in January 2022, and promoting plans to rebuild Aghdam as a modern "smart city" with new housing, infrastructure, and industry. The effort is part of a wider, state-driven campaign to repopulate and redevelop the territories returned after the 2020 war.

Yet reconstruction cannot instantly undo the human erasure. The tens of thousands of residents displaced in 1993 spent nearly three decades as internally displaced people, scattered across Azerbaijan in temporary settlements and waiting for a return that for many came too late or not at all. Rebuilding the physical city is a far quicker task than restoring the dispersed community and the continuity of life that the war destroyed — and the new, planned Aghdam that rises from the rubble will be a different city, inhabited by a generation that knew the old one only through their elders' stories.

Lessons

References

• Agdam Wikipedia
• Agdam Mosque Wikipedia
• Battle of Aghdam Wikipedia
• No-Man's-Land: Inside Azerbaijan's Ghost City Of Agdam Before Its Recapture Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
• Conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh Destroys History as Well as Lives New Lines Magazine