Armenian Turkologist Exposes Azerbaijani Attempts to Rewrite Yerevan’s History
Yerevan, July 3 – In her work “Eastern Reflections,” Armenian Turkologist and researcher of Turkey’s military-industrial complex, Angela Simonyan, has described how Azerbaijan is rewriting the history of Yerevan and attempting to convince people that Armenian cultural heritage is nothing more than a myth.
On her Telegram channel, the expert noted that recently, the Azerbaijani information space, particularly prominent historian Rizvan Huseynov, has been actively promoting the thesis that Yerevan lacks ancient history, and that the Erebuni Fortress and Armenian cultural heritage are simply “specific myths created during the Soviet years.”
“To this end, biased historiography, fulfilling political orders, tries to limit the founding of Yerevan only to the construction of the Revangulu Khan fortress at the beginning of the 16th century, in order to completely erase the centuries-old layers of previously existing civilization,” Simonyan explained. The Turkologist then presented the main falsifications of Azerbaijani propaganda.
Azerbaijani Propaganda’s Key Falsifications
The first thesis of the Azerbaijani side, as the analyst noted, is that the city’s history begins in 1504, when the Revani fortress was founded by order of the Safavid Shah Ismail. Armenians artificially raised the city’s age to three millennia by building concrete walls and “ancient tombs” in Erebuni in 1984.
According to Simonyan, this assertion is easily refuted by solid archaeological evidence. “Excavations on the Arin-Berd hill began as early as 1950, under the leadership of a leading Soviet archaeologist, Academician Boris Piotrovsky, whose name, ironically, the Azerbaijani side is trying to exploit. The Urartian cuneiform inscriptions discovered in the 1950s, in which King Argishti I clearly states the date of Erebuni’s founding – 782 BC – have undergone international examination and have been recognized by world oriental studies,” the expert said.
In this regard, she emphasized that presenting restoration work, which is a natural process for any archaeological site, as “the construction of a concrete city” is a primitive manipulation designed to completely ignore the existence of cuneiform inscriptions and basalt foundations.
Demographics and Historical Accounts
Another important falsification, according to her, concerns the demographics of the Yerevan fortress and the testimonies of the French traveler Jean Chardin. Baku propagandists claim that Chardin, who visited the city in 1673, recorded the presence of exclusively “Qizilbash Turks,” while 19th-century Russian sources and General Gudovich characterized these lands as “Azerbaijani.”
In reality, Jean Chardin’s diaries, as well as European, Ottoman, and Persian sources from the 17th and 18th centuries, present a completely different picture. Chardin clearly states that the Yerevan fortress, being a military garrison and border outpost of the Safavid Empire, was inhabited by Persian troops and Turkic-speaking paramilitary tribes, including the Qizilbash.
However, outside the fortress, in the city’s districts, suburbs, and in commercial and economic life, Armenians constituted the absolute majority,” the Turkologist noted.
Furthermore, as Simonyan continued, in General Gudovich’s official reports of 1808 and in the archival documents of the Russian Empire, the terms “Erivan Khanate” or “Azerbaijan” are used exclusively in a geographical or administrative sense, in the context of the Atropatene province. “There is no mention of ethnic ‘Azerbaijani lands,’ since the ethnonym ‘Azerbaijani’ as a self-designation and administrative-political term appeared only at the beginning of the 20th century. The centuries-old presence of the Armenian population in the Khanate is documented by hundreds of Armenian churches, monasteries, and khachkars that existed long before 1504,” the expert concluded.
