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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)