(Read full article on turan.az)

Azerbaijan’s state tourism agency is planning to offer tours to Aghdam, a city reclaimed by Azerbaijan as a result of last year’s war with Armenia. But with only distant prospects for the city’s former residents to move back, the idea of offering them tours there — and that they will cost money — struck many as inappropriate.

The agency’s chairman, Fuad Naghiyev, made the announcement on August 10. The tours will be oriented toward former residents of the city, which once had a population of more than 30,000 but became a ghost town following Armenia’s victory in the first war with Azerbaijan in the 1990s and Armenian forces’ subsequent occupation of the region.

Naghiyev said the tours would be paid, but emphasized that they would be affordable: “The prices will be nominal and thus not oriented toward commercial gain,” he told the local news outlet Modern.az.

Agency officials had earlier mooted the possibility of organized tours to the region. In July, Elgun Javadov, the head of the agency’s regional tourism development office, said that the agency, along with the Azerbaijan Tourism Bureau, was preparing two tourist routes: one to Aghdam and another to Fuzuli.