Azerbaijan pays half a million dollars to redeem “Shot monuments”

The government of Azerbaijan revealed the amount of money paid for redeeming the monuments of famous Azerbaijanis that have been seized and sold by Armenians during the First Karabakh War in 1991-1994.

Chairman of the International Mugham Center in Baku, Ravan Hasanov, said $500,000 have been paid for the redemption of monuments and their transfer to Azerbaijan, Report informs.

“They [Armenians] tried to sell these monuments in Georgia as scrap metal. With the help of the government of Georgia, the monuments were purchased and delivered to Azerbaijan,” Hasanov said. “These monuments have already been restored and are located in Shusha, in their historical place.”

Monuments of great Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyli, poetess Khurshudbanu Natavan, and singer Bulbul suffered seriously from the Armenian cultural vandalism when Shusha was occupied in 1992. They were illegally transferred to Armenia after the capture of Shusha and then were purchased by the Azerbaijani authorities, brought to Baku and placed in the courtyard of the Museum of Art.

Among the public, they were known as “Shot monuments” due to multiple damages caused by bullets.

The British journalist Thomas de Waal wrote in his “Black Garden” book about Karabakh that Armenians entering Shusha demolished and sold bronze busts of three Azerbaijani musicians and a poetess born in Shusha. These statues were miraculously rescued by a scrap metal trader in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, according to him.

“I saw the three bronze heads, forlorn and pocked with bullets, lying in the courtyard of the headquarters of the Red Cross in the center of Baku: the poet [Natavan], an earnest girl in a headscarf reading a book, missing a thumb; the composer Hajibeyov [Hajibeyli], a bullet-ridden gentleman in double-breasted suit and broken spectacles; and [Bulbul], a famous singer with a serious domed bronze forehead”.

During his visit to Shusha in January 2021, President Ilham Aliyev unveiled all three monuments in their original places in the city center. The monuments have not been recovered from damages so that they continue testifying to the vandalism of Armenians against the cultural heritage of Azerbaijan.