March 1920 went down in the history of Armenia as the month of the brutal massacre of the Armenian population of Shushi, Artsakh.
On the night of March 22-23, the Armenian quarter in the city was destroyed and burned, about 7 thousand houses were destroyed, tens of thousands of Armenians were slaughtered, and the survivors had to escape the city.
Shushi was devastated by what happened in 1920.
The population decreased from 67 thousand to 9 thousand, the city lost its former greatness. Stepanakert was declared the capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic of Artsakh, and Shushi became the regional center.
“I was stunned by the silence. I have never felt such terrible, artificial silence. Suddenly the silence seems to murmur, the stones whisper, move and pounce, and the hairs stand on end…
Somewhere in the stream you can still see a woman’s hair covered in black blood. It’s hard for a person with a good imagination to breathe here.
You walk, walk, walk through rows of charred buildings, or rather pieces of walls, you hurry, fearing that you will never get out of here…” – this is how the poet and prose writer Marietta Shahinyan described the city of Shushi after the massacre in March 1920.