Places of Memory of Western Azerbaijan: The History of the Village of Kivrakh

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 has been collected and systematized on nearly 600 villages where the ancestors of modern Azerbaijanis historically lived. 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 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 the readers the next part of the series, dedicated to the village of Kivrakh in Armenia, where until the 1940s predominantly Azerbaijanis lived.

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 that were used in the preparation of the project, the designations "Turks," "Turko-Tatars," "Islams" or "Mohammedans" are also found. Hereinafter, for the period before 1920, the term "ancestors of Azerbaijanis" will be conventionally used, and for the subsequent period - "Azerbaijanis."

The village was located in Zangezur, where the ancestors of Azerbaijanis historically lived and the western part of which was transferred to Armenia by the Bolsheviks.

During the tsarist period, the village was called Kirzakh, Kivrak, Kvrag, Kivrakh, and during the Soviet period - Kirzakh, Kivrag.

Mentions of the village are found in Ottoman sources of the 16th and 18th centuries.

From the mid-18th century until the Russian conquest, the territory of the village was part of the Karabakh Khanate.

In the early 19th century, the Karabakh Khanate came