RETURNING TO CIDIR DÜZÜ

This article reconstructs the historical trajectory of the Kharibulbul Music Festival (Azerbaijani: Xarıbülbül Musiqi Festivalı), from its establishment in late-Soviet Shusha in 1989 and its interruption amid war and occupation to its revival in 2021 and subsequent consolidation as a recurring international cultural event. The 2021 revival took place at Cıdır Düzü (also rendered as Jidir Plain in English-language sources), Shusha’s historic ceremonial plateau and a longstanding site of public celebration, equestrian traditions, musical performance, and collective gathering. It argues that the festival’s nearly three-decade absence should be understood not as mnemonic disappearance but as institutional interruption accompanied by cultural continuity among displaced Azerbaijanis. Drawing on historical documentation, festival programmes, official records, public speeches, media materials, and the author’s long-term research on displacement and memory, the study treats the festival as a performative site in which music, landscape, political authority, and collective remembrance converge. Particular attention is paid to Cıdır Düzü as a historically layered public landscape and to its contested symbolic use during Armenian control of Shusha. The article demonstrates that the post-2020 restoration of the festival was more than the resumption of a suspended artistic programme: it reattached cultural practice to its original geography and transformed remembered absence into embodied return. By distinguishing material rebuilding from mnemonic and performative reconstruction, the study contributes to debates on cultural memory, heritage after conflict, and the role of revived festivals in rebuilding relations between displaced communities and reclaimed urban landscapes.