Places of Memory of Western Azerbaijan: The History of the Village of Saral, 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 on the territory of modern Armenia, data on nearly 600 villages where the ancestors of modern Azerbaijanis originally lived have 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 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 its readers the next part of the series, dedicated to the village of Saral (Nor Khachakap) in Armenia.

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 certain 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."

Names:

- in the tsarist period - Saral;

- in the Soviet period - Saral, Saralli.

For at least 160 years, the village bore the name Saral. In August 1991, as part of the policy of Armenianization and destruction of Azerbaijani heritage in Armenia, the village was renamed Nor