Baku: Head shot

There some history to this shot taken from a moving taxi cab and - unintentionally - through another taxi cab. The driver was particularly keen to show this scene to me and this was my best (and only) shot seeing that we were due to leave for the airport.

It's an image of the head of Princess Khurshidbanu Natavan, a 19th century Azeri poetess.  This is what remains of her statue which was decapitated and looted by Armenians during the Nagorno-Karabakh war in 1992 (in short: a complicated mess).  I had never heard of this matter and it's an emotional one for Azeris.

Her head was subsequently recovered from a scrap dealer in Tbilisi - the other heads recovered too, and are now standing in this museum yard; the other heads being from statues of "Uzeyir Hajibeyov, the founder of professional composed music .. and Bulbul, a famous tenor".  Their statues were previously located in the town of Shusha, the "heartbeat of the Karabakh", according to Azeris ("ours" according to Armenia ..), and a central part of the ongoing conflict with Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh.