These words were spoken by Sarkhan Khavari, Head of the Science and Education Department of the Presidium of the ANAS, Doctor of Philological Sciences, speaking at the opening ceremony of the II Republican Scientific and Practical Conference on the topic “Western Azerbaijan Folklore: Problems and Prospects”.

The scientist mentioned that after the historic Victory achieved under the leadership of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Victorious Supreme Commander-in-Chief Ilham Aliyev, the return had risen to the level of the nationwide movement and that in the next stage, the return to Western Azerbaijan was one of the main priorities of state policy. He said that the President’s statement “Dear Shusha, we are back!” had become a symbol and emblematic sign of return in state policy.

Sarkhan Khavari noted in his speech that return was not just a geographical movement, but also the restoration of fragmented time, lost memory and shattered meaning. The scientist added that the study of folklore materials in the context of socio-demographic dynamics was one of the current directions of modern folklore studies and allowed for the identification of the echoes of historical processes in collective memory. That fact ensured the transition of folklore from the classical descriptive stage to the conceptual and analytical stage. At the same time, folklore examples preserve national and spiritual values, reflect traces of real-historical and ethnographic processes and support the scientific support of the ideological policy pursued by the state in this area.

Sarkhan Khavari mentioned that Western Azerbaijani folklore was a living part of the common Turkic epic thought system and had the same structural codes as the cultural environments of Anatolia, Karabakh and Borchali.