Information regarding the history and population composition of Gulluduz village has been disclosed.
“Elchi” reports that this information is reflected in “Perished civilization”.
It is noted that in the documents of the Russian Empire dating back to the 19th century and the first third of the 20th century, as well as in other written sources, the ancestors of modern Azerbaijanis were referred to by various terms: “Tatars”, “Caucasian Tatars”, “Turks”, or “Muslims”. In some sources used in the preparation of the project, names such as “Turks”, “Turk-Tatars”, “Islams”, or “Mohammedans” are also encountered.
According to the information, from this point on, the term “ancestors of Azerbaijanis” has been used conditionally for the period up to 1920, and the term “Azerbaijanis” for the subsequent period.
It was stated that the village’s names were “Gulluduz”, “Guluduz” during the Tsarist era, and “Yukhari Gulluduz”, “Ashaghi Gulluduz”, “Nerkin Gulluduz”, and “Verin Gulluduz”, “Gulluduz” during the Soviet era.
The village bore the name “Gulluduz” for at least 118 years.
In April 1991, as part of Armenia’s policy to armenianize and destroy Azerbaijani heritage, the name of the village was changed to “Vardahovit”.
The village has been part of the “Vayots Dzor” province of Armenia since 1995.
Thus, the village was established in the second half of the 19th century. During the Tsarist Russia period, the village was part of the Sharur-Daralayaz district of the Erivan Governorate.
According to statistical data from the Tsarist era, which is also cited by Armenian sources, until 1914, only or mainly the ancestors of Azerbaijanis lived in the village during various periods.
According to the collection of information about the Caucasus, in 1873, 115 people lived in the village, all of whom were ancestors of Azerbaijanis.
According to the collection of statistical data on the population of the Transcaucasian region extracted from the 1886 family lists, 217 people lived in the village in 1886, all of whom were ancestors of Azerbaijanis.
According to Z. Korkotyan’s book “The Population of Soviet Armenia in the Last Hundred Years (1831-1931)”, 263 people lived in the village in 1897, all of whom were ancestors of Azerbaijanis.
In 1905-1906, the Dashnaktsutyun party began to carry out ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population in the Caucasus for the first time. These steps also affected the Erivan Governorate.
The results of the ethnic cleansing are visible when comparing the number of the Turkic population that lived in the village in previous years with their number in 1908.
1908 guidebook of the Erivan Governorate: “In 1908, 151 people lived in the village, all of whom were ancestors of Azerbaijanis”.
1915 Caucasus Calendar: “In 1914, 151 people lived in the village, mainly ancestors of Azerbaijanis,” the report noted.
The material states that on May 29, 1918, the government of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR) ceded the city of Erivan, modern-day Yerevan, and some surrounding areas to the Armenians.
Thus, the first Armenian state was created on lands where the ancestors of modern Azerbaijanis had historically lived. From the first months of its existence, the Republic of Armenia began to make territorial claims against neighboring countries: Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey (the Ottoman Empire at that time).
The nationalist Dashnaktsutyun party, which was in power in Armenia in 1918-1920, carried out ethnic cleansing against the Turkic population in the Erivan Governorate, as well as in other regions, especially in Zangezur, Karabakh, and Nakhchivan.
In the report of the 9th Ottoman Army dated November 27, 1918, Gulluduz is mentioned among the Muslim villages that were subjected to violence within three months. These villages were subsequently subjected to artillery and machine-gun fire, and the residents were forced to leave their homes, suffering a total of 400 casualties.
At the end of 1920, Soviet power was declared in Armenia, and in 1921, the communist regime was firmly established in the country.
Between 1926 and 1959, Gulluduz is mentioned in sources as two separate settlements – “Yukhari Gulluduz” and “Ashaghi Gulluduz”. In 1959, they were reunited into a single village.
The village was subsequently part of the Daralayaz district, which bore the names “Keshishkand”, “Mikoyan”, and “Yeghegnadzor” in succession.
According to Armenian sources, Azerbaijanis lived in the village until the late 1980s.
In Z. Korkotyan’s publication “The Population of Soviet Armenia in the Last Hundred Years (1831-1931)”, there is information that 142 people lived in the village in 1922, all of whom were Azerbaijanis, and in 1926, 32 people lived in the “Ashaghi Gulluduz” village, 31 of whom were Azerbaijanis.
The information states that in 1926, 108 people lived in the “Yukhari Gulluduz” village, all of whom were Azerbaijanis.
Manvelyan A.P., Martirosyan G.M. Settlements and population of the Armenian SSR in 1831-1959: “In 1959, 263 people, mainly Azerbaijanis, lived in Gulluduz village”.
According to the dictionary of toponyms of Armenia and surrounding regions by Hakobyan T.Kh., Melik-Bakhshyan St.T., Barseghyan H.Kh., it is reported that 362 people lived in the village in 1970, and this number was 369 in 1979.
In the late 1980s, as a result of the Armenians’ territorial claims regarding Karabakh and the tension in relations between the two republics, Azerbaijanis were completely deported from the territory of the Armenian SSR.
Between 2021 and 2024, as part of the preparation of the “Perished civilization” book, extensive field work was carried out to identify and document Azerbaijani heritage in the territory of Armenia, including remote mountainous regions. During this work, an Azerbaijani cemetery from the 19th-20th centuries was discovered in the village, where dozens of destroyed tombstones remain.
It should be noted that “Memory places of Western Azerbaijan” is a rare scientific research work. During field studies conducted in the territory of modern Armenia, information about nearly 600 villages where the ancestors of modern Azerbaijanis once lived was collected and systematized for the first time. In some of them, fragments of Turkic cultural and historical heritage – cemeteries, shrines, mosques – have remained.