Agdam

lost places : Ağdam ( formerly - darkometer rating : 9 -) This used to be largest ghost town in the world – formerly a city of ca. 100,000, totally deserted and in ruins, since 1994, and standing (well, only partially) as a most eerie scar left by the Nagorno-Karabakh war. Then in September 2020, Azerbaijan launched a renewed military offensive and in the process retook Ağdam. It will now be slowly repopulated with Azerbaijanis, it is to be expected. For the dark tourist this means Ağdam is now a lost place. No longer being a ghost town it has largely lost its attraction from a dark-tourism perspective anyway, and if at all possible you can only reach it now from within Azerbaijan. In fact, not long after the retaking of Ağdam, the Azeri (dictatorial) government sponsored special tourist trips that included visits to Ağdam for propagandistic purposes (see this note in which I distance myself and dark-tourism.com from such activities). The text below was adapted from the original chapter that I had composed after my 2010 trip to Nagorno-Karabakh . It’s now history. -------------------------------- > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: Ağdam was a predominantly Azeri city in the west of Azerbaijan , near the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh . The figures given for the number of inhabitants vary in different sources, usually between 50,000 and 150,000, so the middle is probably a good approximation to the facts. In any case at ca. 100,000 it was a city, not just a town, in fact the largest of the region, about twice the size of Karabakh's "capital" Stepanakert .