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Hakobyan, Arsen · Mollica, Marcello, 2025
Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2025, ISBN 978-3-031-89206-6 (Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology)
Hakobyan and Mollica present an ethnography of the 2020 war in Artsakh, examining how the conflict reshaped attitudes toward urban space and transnational networks among those who lived through it. The book centers on two cities: Stepanakert, analyzed as the political-institutional capital, and Shushi, treated as the cultural and religious capital, tracing the spatial meanings and symbolic value of urban heritage in each. Chapters follow Artsakh from its origins through its status as an autonomous region under Soviet Azerbaijan, the making of the republic, and the war itself. A chapter on transnationalism and war examines violence moving from Syria to the Artsakh theater, and a chapter on space and war documents cultural cleansing. The authors ground the study in the Armenian anthropological tradition of Artsakh research. The result is a scholarly record of how war, displacement, and heritage destruction transformed Artsakh's urban and social fabric.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Edilyan, Hayk, 2025
Fundamental Armenology, Issue 2(22) 2025, History; DOI 10.54503/1829-4618-2025.2(22)-6 (National Academy of Sciences of RA / All Armenian Foundation Financing Armenological Studies); ISSN 1829-4618
Using Armenian and German-language sources, Edilyan reconstructs how the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society established itself in Shushi between 1820 and 1824. He traces the society's entry into the Russian Empire, the 1821 mission of Dittrich and von Zaremba to St Petersburg, their petition for a Christian colony, and Yermolov's refusal of colony status while permitting a school and printing house. The missionaries reached Shushi in October 1823, toured the surrounding regions, met Armenian clergy including Nerses Ashtaraketsi, and settled there in January 1824. He argues the missionaries planned from the outset to work among Armenians first (through schools, Armenian Bibles and a press) and that this period laid the foundation for the celebrated Shushi printing and school enterprise.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Malkhasyan, Mikayel, 2022
Պատմություն և մշակույթ / History and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 83–100 (Yerevan State University Publishing House); DOI 10.46991/hc.2022.17.1.083
Examines specific questions in the historical demography of Artsakh across the 19th and early 20th centuries, chosen precisely because they are actively falsified by Azerbaijani writers. The article studies the displacement of Artsakh's Armenian population during the Russo-Persian wars, the actual scale of Persian-Armenian resettlement into Artsakh after the 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay, the share of the native Armenian population in Shushi, and the relationship between monastic landholding and demography using Dadivank as the example. It finds that migration processes visible from the mid-18th century took new form during the Russo-Persian wars, with Armenians moving from the foothills and plains into the mountainous districts; that the number of Iranian-Armenian resettlers in Artsakh was far smaller than in the Armenian oblast; and that the 1897 imperial census and later statistics confirm an Armenian majority in Shushi.
