History
In antiquity, this rayon was part of the province of Utik. The region was referred to as the "Albanian plain" by its local historians Movses Kaghankatvatsi, Movses Khorenatsi, and Hovannes Draskhanakertsi. The region was conquered by a succession of neighbouring powers or invaders, including Sassanid Persians, the Byzantine Empire, the Arabs, the Seljuq Turks, the Georgians, the Mongols, the Timurids, the Kara Koyunlu and Ak Koyunlu Turkoman tribes, and finally Safavid Iran.
After the Russo-Persian War (1804-1813), the Russian Empire gained control of the area by virtue of the Treaty of Gulistan. Under Russian rule, it formed the northeastern part of the Kazakh uyezd of the Elisabethpol Governorate. A contemporary military historian noted the following ethnographic detail: "Abbas Mirza's route lay through the country of the great tribe of the Casaks, which is extremely strong and thickly wooded." He further notes that: "These have no connection with the Russian Cossacks. They are descended from men of the Kirgis Casaks, left by Genghis Khan, and are Mahomedans of the Soonnie sect. They are frequently called Kara Papaks, from wearing black sheep-skin caps."
When the South Caucasus came under British occupation, Sir John Oliver Wardrop, British Chief Commissioner in the South Caucasus, decided that assigning the Erivan Governorate and the Kars Oblast to Democratic Republic of Armenia (DRA) and the Elisabethpol and Baku Governorates to the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR) would solve the region's outstanding disputes. However, this proposal was rejected by both Armenians (who did not wish to give up their claims to Kazakh, Zangezur (today Syunik), and Nagorno-Karabakh) and Azerbaijanis (who found it unacceptable to give up their claims to Nakhichevan). As conflict broke out between the two groups, the British left the region in mid-1919.
Read more about this topic: Qazakh Rayon
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“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
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—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)