was destroyed. Between May 1992 and November 2020, Shusha was under the de facto control of the breakaway Republic of Artsakh and administered as the centre of its Shushi Province. On 8 November 2020, Azerbaijani forces retook the city during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War following a three-day long battle. The Armenian population of the city fled, and multiple reports emerged that the Armenian cultural heritage of the city was being destroyed. Etymology Several historians believe Shusha derives from the New Persian Shīsha ("glass, vessel, bottle, flask"). According to the Oxford Concise Dictionary of World Place-Names, when Iranian ruler Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar approached the town with his army, he reportedly told the ruler of Karabakh Ibrahim Khalil Khan: Panahabad ("City of Panah"), Shusha's previous name, was a tribute to Panah Ali Khan, the first ruler of the Karabakh Khanate. According to the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, published in the final decades of the Russian Empire, the town's name comes from the nearby village Shushikent (called Shosh in Armenian), which literally means "Shusha village" in the Azerbaijani language. Conversely, the Armenian historian Leo (1860–1932) considered it more likely that the village Shosh received its name from the fortress, which he considered the older settlement. According to Armenian sources, the name Shusha most likely derives from the dialectal Armenian word shosh/shush (Armenian: շոշ/շուշ), meaning tree sprout or, figuratively, a high place, first applied either to the adjacent village Shosh or to Shusha itself. The form Shusha can also be explained as the genitive form of shosh/shush, as -a or -ay is a common declensional ending for placenames in pre-modern and dialectal Armenian. One folk etymology connects it to another definition of shosh in the Karabakh dialect derived from Russian shosse, meaning street or highway, although this is unlikely because the names Shusha and Shosh are older than Russian influence on the Armenian language. In the first written reference to the settlement in a 15th-century Armenian manuscript, the name is rendered as Shushu. Besides the common Armenian name Shushi, the town has historically been referred to in Armenian by various names, including Shoshi/Shushva Berd, Shoshi Sghnakh, Shoshvaghala, which all mean "Shosh/Shushi Fortress". History Foundation A settlement at Shusha is first recorded in a 15th-century illustrated Armenian gospel kept on display at Yerevan's Matenadaran (archival number 8211), which mentions a "Shushu village". The gospel was written by the scribe and artist Ter-Manuel in