Places of Memory of Western Azerbaijan: What Remains of the Azerbaijani Heritage in the Village of Karakaya?

A unique project has been presented to the public - a research work titled "Places of Memory of Western Azerbaijan."

For the first time, during field research conducted on the territory of modern-day Armenia, data on nearly 600 villages where the ancestors of modern Azerbaijanis historically lived has been collected and systematized. In some of these villages, fragments of Turkic cultural and historical heritage have been preserved - cemeteries, shrines, and 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-day 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 a duty of each of us.

BAKU.WS presents to readers the next part of the series, dedicated to the village of Karakaya (now Dzoravank) 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 certain sources used in the preparation of the project, the designations "Turks," "Turko-Tatars," "Islams," or "Mohammedans" are also encountered. Hereafter, for the period before 1920, the term "ancestors of Azerbaijanis" will be conditionally used, and for the subsequent period - "Azerbaijanis."

Names:

- in the tsarist period - Karakaya;

- in the Soviet period - Karakaya.

For at least a century, the village bore the name Karakaya. In April 1991, as part of the policy of Armenianization and destruction of Azerbaijani heritage in Armenia, the village was renamed to Dzoravank.

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

The village is mentioned in the second half of the 19th century as a territory under the jurisdiction of the village of Gelkend. As part of tsarist Russia, the village was part of the Kazakh Uy