Mariam Andreasyan is registered in a building that no longer exists. The address is Ghazanchetsots 72 apartment 8. If you have ever visited Shushi, you might have seen the Mariam building. It was directly in front of Ghazanchetsots Holy Savior Cathedral.

“From one balcony you can see the Ghazanchetsots church, from the other - Kanach Zham. You are a gifted person,” said a stranger who met Mariam in the yard when she was a teenager. These words remained in her memory.

When leaving Yerevan to Artsakh, we were looking for gifted people with that meaning. People who grew up under the gaze of Ghazanchetsots church.

We met Mariam Andreasyan in Stepanakert. The capital of Artsakh is now one of the destinations where the people from Shushi moved after the war.

“I was born in Shushi. My mother and father are not from Shushi. Mom from Gyumri, after the earthquake in 1988, decided to move to Artsakh. My father, having returned from the army, again decides that he should be in Shushi in the 80s. There was a war, at the end of 1994, mom and dad got married, in 1995 I was born.

Later the family moved to Gyumri. Mariam went to school, and in the early 2000s they returned with the idea of not leaving Shushi.

We ask Mariam, who grew up there, what was different about Shushi? And for her, Shushi was not a cloudy city, it was an ordinary place of residence with its own everyday life and routine.

Along with Shushi, Mariam also grew up, witnessing its post-war years, the increase in population and the revival of the city.

She tells how she played a game with her brothers, counting how many cars pass on their street. At first there were several ones, then new events, weddings and luxury cars came up.

According to Mariam, most of the inhabitants of Shushi, as in other cities, were burdened with everyday affairs and cared little about making the city alive. But there were individuals who came to Shushi, organized cultural centers, entertainment places, camps, cultural education…

“During my school years, until 2012, 2013, 2015, there was little cultural life in Shushi. Because people thought about how to earn a living. Then I remember that Shushi became more cultural."

Mariam enumerates: Varanda Choir, Narekatsi Art Union, Artsakh Ministry of Culture moved to Shushi, vocational colleges and other "colorizing" centers.

Mariam says, the war threw us back in history. "for several years, if not for 30-40 years." We lost cultural Shushi.

Not having finished the war yet, the Azerbaijanis began a process that, in their opinion, should perpetuate the loss of Shushi to the Armenians.

Mariam feels sad both for the cultural values of her home and for the cultural institutions of the city. She notes that at least during the war, the state authorities had to take the cultural heritage of Shushi outside the city. Even if the city had not been captured, these samples could have been damaged.

Mariam says that they also had an icon in their house. Her mother found that after the First (Artsakh) war, in ruins. Experts said it could be the 8th or 9th century. They were looking for honest people who could place it in museums but the icon was also left at an address that no longer exists, at their home in Shushi.

Most of the inhabitants of Shushi, like Mariam herself, did not manage to take anything not only cultural, but also personal. She left the city with great difficulty only after her family members insisted on it.

She tells that on the first day of the war, they took refuge in the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral. They thought that the Azerbaijanis would not attack the church…

Days later, strange people come to the church, "to take measurements". After that, with doubt in their hearts, the family moves to another place for shelter. Mariam no longer goes to Shushi's apartment.

On the tenth day of the war, they come to their building, the mother asks to take the documents from the house so that she can leave.

After her “forced” departure from Shushi, Mariam spent a period of internal unrest in Gyumri, Yerevan, trying to restore herself emotionally through educational and cultural activities.

But even now Mariam continues to blame herself. Not because she didn't go up to the house "for the last time". She thinks that if the population had remained, the outcome of the war might have been different.

Mariam Andreasyan has been living in Stepanakert for more than a year. She says it was hard for him at the beginning because she couldn't accept that people were living their daily lives again without rethinking everything.

Now Mariam teaches national dances in Artsakh, mainly in the regions, in addition, she is also engaged in social activities.

Lernik Hovhannisyan, Deputy Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sports of Artsakh, states that they are now checking what exhibits of state museums and private collections have remained under Azerbaijani control.

On May 30, a state council was formed to list all the tangible and intangible cultural heritage that remained in the occupied territories.

According to Hovhannisyan, since there is no access to the territories under the control of Azerbaijan, it is also impossible to find out the destiny of the collections. They get such information only from publications on social networks.

Vardan Astsatryan, the founder of the Shushi Carpet Museum, learned from such posts on social networks that the carpets of the museum's reserve, non exhibiting fund were looted by the first Azerbaijani groups that entered Shushi in the last days of the war and after the ceasefire.

Astsatryan says that he applied to the Ministry of Culture of Artsakh with a request to provide a car to rescue the carpets. He doesn’t remember exactly whether it was at the end of October or at the beginning of November that only those carpets that were on exhibition at that moment were taken out and preserved.

The next day the collection of paintings was also taken out, but the carpets from the reserve fund have not been rescued.

In total, about 160-170 pieces of carpets, about 30 pieces of pottery, bronze items dating back to the BC period were taken out etc. Many medieval exhibits remained in Shushi.

Shushi's salvaged carpets were temporarily displayed in the National Museum of Architecture named after Alexander Tamanyan in Yerevan. Then they were stored in the warehouse of the same museum. However, according to Astsatryan, carpets should not be stored for a long time, they may deteriorate due to moisture or moths.

According to Astsatryan, later there were discussions on an exhibition together with other carpets in the History Museum of Armenia, but he did not agree, as he considers the mixed exhibition with other carpets is wrong.

Lusine Gharakhanyan headed the Artsakh Ministry of Culture during the war. Now she is an advisor to the President of Artsakh. She tells that when Hadrut fell, they took steps to bring out the exhibits from museums. First of all, the most valuable exhibits of the Stepanakert historical-geological museum,Tigranakert museum, and some valuable items from the Keren burial ground were brought out.

According to Garakhanyan, disagreements arose in the case of the Shushi museums. The museum management at first thought that the samples were safe in Shushi, and when the battles were already close, they said that they were afraid to move the exhibits. At the same time, the exhibits of the Museum of Stones and the Museum of Fine Arts were collected and stored in basements and warehouses for transportation in case of possibility.

Lusine Gasparyan, who was head of Shushi Museums non-commercial state organization presents some information about the collections of Shushi museums left to Azerbaijanis. According to her, except for the Museum of Carpets, the exhibits of other museums were not taken out.

It turns out that everything that was in Shushi remained under the control of the Azerbaijanis, no evacuation was carried out. According to Gasparyan, most of the exhibits of all Shushi museums were collected, transported to the bomb shelter of the Museum of Fine Arts and left there packed.

After the war, the authorities of Artsakh had an intention to at least exchange cultural works: to transfer to Baku the Azerbaijani paintings that remained in Artsakh after the first war, and receive the Armenian paintings that remained in the museums of Shushi.

Lusine Gharakhanyan says that they tried to propose and implement it through Russian peacekeepers.

According to Gharakhanyan, there were also single works of Saryan, Garzu and Zhansem, as well as other works, in the Shushi Museum of Fine Arts. Gharakhanyan does not know what happened to them. There are rumors, but no facts.

The fate of the Sculpture Park, opened in front of the museum, is also unknown. According to Garakhanyan, it is likely that the Azerbaijanis simply threw these sculptures into the canyon in order to free the territory.