The history of the Azerbaijani village of Sheki in Armenia, whose residents were subjected to expulsion twice

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 originally lived have been collected and systematized. In some of them, 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 a chronology of the gradual "disappearance" of the Turkic population as a result of expulsions and ethnic cleansing.

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.

We present to the readers the first part of the series, dedicated to the village of Sheki (now Shaki).

The village is located in Zangezur — on land where the ancestors of Azerbaijanis historically lived and the western part of which was handed over to Armenia by the Bolsheviks.

During the tsarist period, it bore