Places of Memory of Western Azerbaijan: The History of the Expulsion of the Indigenous Population from the Village of Okhchi-oghly

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-day Armenia, data on nearly 600 villages where the ancestors of modern Azerbaijanis historically lived have been collected and systematized. In some of them, fragments of Turkic cultural and historical heritage - cemeteries, shrines, 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) who lived there in the 19th-20th centuries, as well as its history 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 a duty of each of us.

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

In the 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 "Muhammedans" are also found. Hereinafter, for the period before 1920, the term "ancestors of Azerbaijanis" will be used conventionally, and for the subsequent period - "Azerbaijanis."

During the tsarist period, the settlement was called Okhchi-ogly, and during the Soviet period - Okhchogly.

For at least 105 years, the village bore the name Okhchi-ogly. In April 1991, as part of the policy of Armenianization and destruction of Azerbaijani heritage in Armenia, the village was renamed to Vokhchi.

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

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