Burned, tortured, forgotten no more: 33 years after the Aghdaban massacre Azerbaijan commemorates victims of Armenian atrocities

Thirty-three years ago tonight, the quiet mountain village of Aghdaban in Azerbaijan’s Kalbajar district was turned into a smoldering graveyard. What was once a village of 130 homes became a place of horror, fire, and unspeakable pain — its name forever etched into the memory of a nation.

In the dead of night, between April 7 and 8, 1992, Armenian forces launched a brutal assault on Aghdaban, razing the entire village to the ground, Caliber.Az recalls.

Every home was set ablaze, every street engulfed in flames. Nothing was spared. Not even the whispers of poetry that once floated through the highland air.

Of the 779 civilians living there, hundreds were tortured. Thirty-two souls were extinguished in one night — eight of them elderly, between 90 and 100 years old. Two were young children. Seven women were burned alive. Not killed. Burned—while still breathing, in their homes.

But this was not just a massacre of life. It was an assault on culture, memory, and identity. Among the flames vanished irreplaceable literary works: manuscripts of Gurban Aghdabanli, a local poet whose verses had captured the spirit of the mountains, and Dede Shamshir, a master of classical ashugh poetry whose words once echoed through the valleys. Their legacy, like the village, was consumed in fire.

This was no isolated act of violence. It was part of a broader campaign of cultural and human destruction. A calculated erasure.

The first to voice a legal and political reckoning of the atrocity was Azerbaijan’s National Leader, Heydar Aliyev. He did not mince words. He called the Agdaban tragedy “one of the gravest crimes against humanity” and “a disgrace to all of mankind.”

Today, as Azerbaijan remembers the massacre, it also remembers the cost of silence, the fragility of heritage, and the enduring scars of war. The village of Aghdaban no longer stands, but its memory, seared into the national consciousness, burns brighter than ever.

By Tamilla Hasanova