# Memorial Sites of Western Azerbaijan: History and Archival Facts of the Village of Amasia

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 on the territory of modern Armenia, data on nearly 600 villages where ancestors of modern Azerbaijanis originally lived has been collected and systematized. In some of them, fragments of Turkic cultural and historical heritage have been preserved — cemeteries, shrines, mosques.

A separate video has been prepared for each village in three languages (English, Azerbaijani, Russian), containing fragments of photo and video footage of the specific village on the territory of modern 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 cleansings.

Western Azerbaijan is historically a geographical 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.WS presents to readers the next part of the series, dedicated to the village of Amasia in Armenia, where an Azerbaijani cemetery with desecrated tombstones has been preserved.

During the tsarist period, the settlement was called Amasia, and during the Soviet period — Gukasyan, Amasia.

In tsarist and Soviet sources, the village appeared under the name Amasia. In 1951, it was renamed Gukasyan, and in 1956, its former name was restored.

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

On the eve of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, the territory of the village was part of the Kars Sanjak of the Ottoman Empire. As a result of the war, the Treaty of Berlin was concluded, according to which the Ottoman Empire was forced to cede Kars, Ardahan, and Batum (now Batumi) to Russia. During the tsarist Russian period, the village belonged to the Kars District of Kars Province.

According to statistical data from the tsarist period, also cited in Armenian sources, at various times before 1914, the village was inhabited exclusively or predominantly by ancestors of Azerbaijanis. In some sources, they are referred to as Karapapakhs (an ethnographic group of Azerbaijanis).

Compendium of Statistical Data on the Population of the Transcaucasian Region, Extracted from Family Lists of 1886:

In 1886, 274