Zar, Azerbaijan

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Zar
Tsar001.JPG
Zar is located in Azerbaijan
Zar
Zar
Coordinates: 40°00′19″N 45°57′08″E / 40.00528°N 45.95222°E / 40.00528; 45.95222Coordinates: 40°00′19″N 45°57′08″E / 40.00528°N 45.95222°E / 40.00528; 45.95222
Country Azerbaijan
DistrictKalbajar
Population
 (2015)[1]
 • Total83
Time zoneUTC+4 (AZT)

Zar (Armenian: Ծար, romanized: Tsar; Armenian pronunciation: [tsɑɾ], also Tzar) is a village in the Kalbajar District of Azerbaijan.

The history of the village goes back to the early medieval period, when it was the administrative center of the Kingdom of Artsakh's canton of Tsar. Until the 11th to 12th centuries, the village went by the name of Vaykunik' (Armenian: Վայկունիք).[2]

Etymology[]

The 13th-century St. Sargis Church in the village

Armenian architectural historian Samvel Karapetian has written that name Zar is the Turkish pronunciation of the settlement's Armenian name Tsar which, due to its size, was still being referred to as Mets Tsar (Great Tsar) as late as the 18th century.[3]

A popular Azeri legend gives an alternative origin. A poor young man named Zasa once lived in this village. He was in love with a girl named Nasy whose parents did not approve of their relationship. Zasa then decided to ask Nadir Shah for help. He planted a watermelon in a jar with a narrow neck. The surprised shah liked it and ordered Nasy to be given to Zasa. However, as soon as Nadir Shah left town, Nasy's family went to Zasa's house, killed him and threw his body into a well. After that, Zasa's mother wept for many days. The name Zar was said to be derived from this legend because the Azerbaijani word zarıldamaq (zaryldamag) translates as "to sob."[4]

History[]

In the fourteenth century, the Armenian Dop'ian family established itself in Tsar and remained there until its fortresses were devastated by the invasions of Tamerlane.[5] But the Armenian lords were able to recover by the fifteenth century, when Tsar was made the center for the Armenian meliks of Upper Khachen. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the town was enclosed by a line of walls and other defensive fortifications. In the 1730s and 1750s, a large number of Turkic tribes and Kurds from Iran established themselves in Tsar and subsequently renamed the village Zar.[6] In the early nineteenth century, the village was attacked and pillaged by the armies of the Ottoman Empire.[2]

Despite its ruinous state, in the late 1890s the scholar-bishop Makar Barkhutariants was able to travel to Tsar and photograph the ruins of the monastery of the Holy Virgin (built in 1225), the chapels of St. Sargis and Grigor (built in 1274) and other medieval-era monuments (largely dating to the 13th and 15th centuries).[7]

Karapetian has written that the Armenian monuments in Zar (monasteries, churches and cemeteries) started to be destroyed by Kurds at the end of the 19th century, and that the destruction continued on a larger scale during the Soviet period and especially during the 1940s and 1950s. In particular, he documented that a school built in the village in the 1950s was constructed using stones taken from the 14th-century Holy Mother of God of the Confluence Monastery (Getamijo Surb Astvatsatsin) that had stood at the edge of Tsar: he identified 133 carved or inscribed stone fragments reused within the walls of the school.[6][8]

The village was located in the Armenian-occupied territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh, coming under the control of ethnic Armenian forces during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in the early 1990s. The village subsequently became part of the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh as part of its Shahumyan Province. The village had 52 inhabitants in 2005,[9] and 83 inhabitants in 2015.[1] The village was handed over to Azerbaijan on 25 November 2020 as part of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh ceasefire agreement.

Gallery[]

  • Scenery around the village

  • Wall of St. Sargis Church with ornaments

  • Azeri cemetery of Zar village, tombstones and mausoleum

  • The 13th-century St. Grigor Church

  • Monastery of the Holy Virgin or Kusanats Anapat near the village, founded in 1174

  • Kusanats Anapat interior

  • Kusanats Anapat

  • A sign in Armenian reading "Tsar" denoting the boundary limit of the village

  • A monument built in honour of the Armenian troops who died in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War

  • One of the canyons that surround the village

  • Ruins of the village school built in the 1950s and containing stones taken from an Armenian monastery

  • Fragments of Armenian gravestones

  • Ruins of Armenian churches

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ a b Hakob Ghahramanyan. "Directory of socio-economic characteristics of NKR administrative-territorial units (2015)".
  2. ^ a b (in Armenian) Ulubabyan, Bagrat. s.v. "Tsar," Armenian Soviet Encyclopedia, 1979, vol. 5, p. 120.
  3. ^ Karapetian, Samvel. Armenian Cultural Monuments in the Region of Karabakh. Trans. Anahit Martirossian. Yerevan: Gitutiun Publishing House of NAS RAA, 2001, p. 13.
  4. ^ G. Arasly (1982). Библиотека азербайджанской классической литературы в 20 томах [Library of Azerbaijani Classic Literature, 20 volumes. Folklore] (in Russian). Baku: Nauka. p. 52.
  5. ^ Karapetian. Armenian Cultural Monuments, p. 11.
  6. ^ a b Hovhannisyan, Hasmik. "New Shahumyan Archived October 2, 2011, at the Wayback Machine." Hetq. July 23, 2007. Retrieved December 8, 2010.
  7. ^ For these photographs, see (in Armenian) Makar Barkhudaryants, Artsakh. Baku: Tparan Aror, 1895.
  8. ^ Karapetian. Armenian Cultural Monuments, pp. 50–65.
  9. ^ "The Results of the 2005 Census of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic" (PDF). National Statistic Service of the Republic of Artsakh.

Further reading[]

  • Karapetyan, Samvel. Armenian Cultural Monuments in the Region of Karabakh. Trans. Anahit Martirossian. Yerevan: Gitutiun Publishing House of NAS RAA, 2001.
  • (in Armenian) Ulubabyan, Bagrat. Khacheni ishkhanutyune, x-xvi darerum [The Principality of Khachen in the 10th to 16th centuries]. Yerevan: Armenian Academy of Sciences, 1975.

External links[]

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