Footage from the village of Gelkend, where Azerbaijanis lived for centuries

A unique project has been presented to the public — the research work "Places of Memory of Western Azerbaijan."

For the first time, during field research conducted on the territory of modern-day Armenia, data on nearly 600 villages where ancestors of modern Azerbaijanis historically lived has been collected and systematized. In some of them, fragments of Turkic cultural and historical heritage — cemeteries, shrines, and mosques — have been preserved.

A separate video has been prepared for each village in three languages (English, Azerbaijani, Russian), containing photo and video footage of the specific village on the territory of modern-day Armenia, documented data on the number of Turks (ancestors of modern Azerbaijanis) in the 19th–20th centuries in the specific village, as well as the history of the village and the chronology of the gradual "disappearance" of the Turkic population as a result of expulsions and ethnic cleansing.

Western Azerbaijan is historically a geographic space where hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis lived. Despite attempts to erase the traces of our compatriots in these territories, remembering and being aware of the ancient places of residence of Azerbaijanis in Western Azerbaijan is the duty of each of us.

Baku TV presents to readers the next part of the series, dedicated to the village of Gelkend (now Aygut) in Armenia.

During the tsarist period, this settlement was called Gelkend, Karakoyunlu, and during the Soviet period — Gelkend.

For several centuries, the village bore the name Gelkend. In some tsarist sources, the village name is listed as Karakoyunlu. In April 1991, as part of the policy of Armenianization and destruction of Azerbaijani heritage in Armenia, the village was renamed Aygut.

Since 1995, the village has been part of the Gegharkunik Province of the Republic of Armenia.

Mentions of the village are found in Ottoman sources of the 16th and 18th centuries, where it was attributed to the Daghlyg Garagaya region. During the Safavid period, this territory was part of the Shamshadin region, which later came under the dependence of the Kartli-Kakheti Kingdom.

In 1801, Alexander I, with the manifesto "To the Georgian People," definitively confirmed the annexation of the Kartli-Kakheti Kingdom: the Georgian monarchy was abolished, and Eastern Georgia was incorporated into the Russian Empire. During