But homes, roads, bridges and railings did not. Four years after a truce was signed at Bishkek the rail yards leading to what once was Stepanakert's train station still amount to a graveyard of railway freight cars tossed helter-skelter like children's toys, some as much as 500 meters from where the tracks once were. Most of the rails are gone. Few signs remain of the massive destruction Stepanakert suffered. Reconstruction has been rapid.
Construction is now under way on new housing blocks and a hotel.
The town has a poor and rundown look to it. The main employers are the army and the government. In contrast to the administrative and military center of Stepanakert, Shusha offers a rare collection of Armenian and Azeri historic architectural styles although heavily damaged in fighting in this century. A pig ambles down Shusha's main street beneath housing blocks deeply scarred by artillery shelling yet still inhabited, make-shift chimneys jutting out of numerous windows, funneling smoke from wood burning kitchen stoves. At the moment the army of the defense of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic is in a state of relative truce, relative because all along the front line there are exchanges of fire every day with the Azeri army, resulting in soldiers getting killed and suffering by the civilian population living nearby.