Baku’s Bare-faced Denial of History

By Artsvi Bakhchinyan,

In these sad days of ethnic cleansing of Armenian population of Artsakh, I would like to remind to the blind and corrupted mankind the following three historical facts regarding Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabagh) and the Armenians of Baku.

1. Among many non-Armenian sources testifying Artsakh being a historically Armenian province is “Travel to Europe, Asia and Africa” by German traveler and writer Johann (Hans) Schiltberger (1380 – c. 1440). At the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396, Schiltberger was wounded and taken prisoner, after which Sultan Bayezid I took him into his service as a runner. On Bayezid’s overthrow at the Battle of Ankara in 1402, Schiltberger passed into the service of Bayezid’s conqueror Timur: he appears to have followed Timur to Samarkand, Armenia and Georgia. Later wrote “Travel to Europe, Asia and Africa,” recording his own experiences in three continents, including the descriptions of various west Caucasian and Armenian regions and the areas around the Caspian basin.

In 1984, “Travel to Europe, Asia and Africa” was published in Baku under the editorship of the Azerbaijani historian Ziya Buniyatov, infamous with his numerous historical falsifications. In this edition, the original text of the German traveler was carefully “cleaned up”. Buniyatov omitted chapters 63-66 of Schiltberger’s text (about twenty pages) relating to Armenia and Armenians, and partially changed the text. So, for example, he completely removed the sentence that the land of Karabakh “… lies in Armenia, nevertheless it belongs to the pagans [Muslims – A .B.], to whom the Armenian villages are forced to pay taxes…”

2. Samvel Madoyan on his Facebook account posted the below photo – the book cover of “Tatar Language Self-Teaching for Russians” by Nariman Narimanov, teacher of Tatar language at the Baku Male Gymnasium. Here “Tatar” means the Turkic language, today known as Azeri. While today Azerbaijan makes ultimate efforts to prove to be an indigenous people of South Caucasus, the name “Tatar” says everything. As Madoyan states: “The fact that this nation without history does not have an alphabet is not such a shame. Now whether they write in Cyrillic or in Arabic, it is somehow understandable and forgivable. Unlike Armenians, many nations and states of the world do not have an alphabet. The question is that 120 years ago they were called Caucasian Tatars and the native language of this ‘ancient nation’ was Tatar. Here is one of the millions of proofs that today’s Azeris are a nation descended from the nomadic Seljuk-Mongol-Tatar tribes. And its Azerbaijan name is named after Atrpatakan region of historical Armenia, now in the north of Persia, located south of the Araks River. In other words, when this book was published, Azerbaijan had not yet been invented. Later, 32 years after the founding of Coca-Cola, in 1918, the state of Azerbaijan appeared on the map. And now the other part of this document that deserves attention: the book was printed in the Armenian “Aror” printing house operating in Baku in 1900. It is not enough that they did not have an alphabet, the printing press is also Armenian.”

In Baku, from 1885 to the end of the century, “Aror,” as well as Armenian printing houses of A. Ter-Hovhannisyants, H. Dyulbasaryan, S. Shahbaghyan’s and Ghazaryan brothers have operated. “Aror” and Shahbaghyan’s printing house functioned until 1920.

3. In 1918, the five-ruble currency oft he city of Baku, along with common number 5 and Arabic ٥ bears also the fifth letter of Armenian alphabet- “Ե.”

There is also a Christian architectural arch with crosses on it.

No mention of the so-called Azerbaijan (just Baku City Government) or their “alphabet.”

Let Azeri and Azeri-supported foreign historians ask themselves: why Azeri “academician” omitted Armenia-related chapters of a German traveler, why the Tartar book has been published in an Armenian printing house and why there is an Armenian letter on Baku’s currency…

Surely, those undoubted facts cannot ease the pain of loss of Artsakh, yet they are additional proofs of who was who in the region. Proofs that do not mean anything for the corrupted double-standard “civilized” world – blinded by petrodollars and caviar diplomacy – who closed its eyes against the genocidal threat of Artsakh. Sure, Artsakh Armenians, unlike Kosovo Albanians, have no right for self-determination…