# Memorial Sites of Western Azerbaijan: The History of the Village of Kursali

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 the ancestors of modern Azerbaijanis historically lived has been collected and systematized. In some of them, fragments of Turkic cultural and historical heritage have survived - cemeteries, shrines, mosques.

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 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 the ancient places of residence of Azerbaijanis in Western Azerbaijan and being aware of them is the duty of each of us.

BAKU.WS presents to readers the next part of the series, dedicated to the village of Kursali (now Arjaovit) in Armenia, where Azerbaijanis lived until the late 1980s.

In documents of the Russian Empire and other written sources of the 19th - first third of the 20th century, the ancestors of modern Azerbaijanis were designated by various terms: "Tatars," "Caucasian Tatars," "Turks," or "Muslims." In some sources used in the preparation of the project, the designations "Turks," "Turko-Tatars," "Islams," or "Mohammedans" are also found. Hereafter, for the period before 1920, the term "ancestors of Azerbaijanis" will be conventionally used, and for the subsequent period - "Azerbaijanis."

Names:

- in the tsarist period - Kursali, Kursaly;

- in the Soviet period - Kursali.

In tsarist and Soviet sources, the village is mentioned under the name Kursali.

In December 1995, the name of the village was changed to Khursali. Currently, two names of the village are used in official Armenian sources: Gursal and Arjaovit. The latter was introduced as part of the policy of