A book about Armenian monuments of Shahumian Region to be published

YEREVAN, JUNE 13, ARMENPRESS: 20 years have passed from the collapse of Shahumian Region. Deputy Chairman of M. Abeghyan Institute of Literature Vardan Ghevrikyan said we should value our losses and remember similar days from the viewpoint of preserving the historical culture. "We should speak of losses too, or else impression is formed that we have been an aggressor, and have only occupied without conceding anything," he said.

Monument expert Samvel Karapetyan has been to this region for three times. "For the first time I have been here in 1978, from 1980 I have studied the side more thoroughly, and my last visit was in 1989. I have managed to be in all villages, and soon a large volume on that topic will be published, as the territory is very rich in monuments, even in Turkish-populated villages Armenian cross-stones were exhibited in museums," he said. Samvel Karapetyan noted that first of all every Armenian should perfectly know his/her homeland not to lose an inch of land in future.

In antiquity Shahumian Region was a part of Artsakh; in the Middle Ages it was part of the principality of Khachen; in the 17-18th centuries the territory formed part of Melik-Abovian dynasty's melikdom of Gulistan, with its capital in the fortress of that name. During Soviet times in the area was renamed after the Armenian Bolshevik Stepan Shahumyan, its administrative center taking the same name.

By the 1990s the population of Shahumian district was almost exclusively Armenian by language and ethnicity, though the area was not included within the boundaries of theNagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast by the Soviet Union.

In the spring-summer of 1991, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev ordered Operation Ring, in which the Soviet Red Army surrounded some of the area's Armenian villages and violently deported their inhabitants to Armenia.

Approximately 17,000 Armenians living in Shahumian's twenty-three villages were deported out of the region.

In December 1991 with the Soviet Union imploding, Shahumian was claimed by the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and became the focus for considerable fighting. This reached a climax in summer 1992 when most of the area was retaken by the Azerbaijan army. Damage was severe and the Armenian population fled.