Oğuz () is a city, municipality and the capital of the Oghuz District of Azerbaijan. The village was mainly populated by Udis before the exodus of Armenians from Azerbaijan after the outbreak of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Etymology The name Oghuz comes from the Oghuz Turks, which Azerbaijanis are a part of.
Before 1991 the town was called Vartashen (), which means town of roses in Armenian; 'Vard' meaning rose and 'shen' meaning town or village. This is in reference to the abundance of roses that naturally grow in this place.Jost Gippert «Relative Clauses in Vartashen Udi Preliminary Remarks» «Iran and the Caucasus» Brill Publishers 2011. Стр. 208: The Armenian-based etymology given there (Arm. vard 'rose' and šēn 'village', i.e. 'rose-village') seems first to have been proposed by A. Berger (Berže) as it is also found in Seidlitz 1863: 171 (where, however, the name is spelt 'Wartaschîn'). The Udi pronunciation of today is vartašen. A colophon on Armenian manuscript dating to 1466 suggests possibly earlier bilingual variants of the name: Giwlstan (), and Vardud ().
The town was renamed to Oghuz in 1991 during the expulsion of the Armenian and autochthonous Udi population.
Population Until 1991, Vartashen was mainly a Udi village, where the Vartashen dialect of the Udi language was spoken by about 3000 people in the 1980s. The Udis of Vartashen belonged to the Armenian and Gregorian Church and had Armenian surnames.
During the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, most Udis of the town were expelled by the local activists of Popular Front of Azerbaijan. The Udis, bearing Armenian names and belonging to both the Armenian and the Gregorian Church, had been viewed as Armenians and hence suffered the same fate as other Armenians in Azerbaijan. Some 50 Udi people remained in the town.Wolfgang Schulze: Towards a History of Udi. International Journal of Diachronic Linguistics 1, 2005, pp. 55–91.
There were also Tat-speaking Mountain Jews in Vartashen. Most of them have emigrated to Israel, but possibly 80 have stayed.Sarah Marcus: Mountain Jews. Tablet, Tbilisi, 18. Januar 2018.Michael Zand: Language and Literature. In: Liya Mikdash-Shamailov: Mountain Jews: Customs and Daily Life in the Caucasus. The Israel Museum (Muzeon Yisrael), Jerusalem 2002, p. 37.
Climate
Notable people Movses Silikyan (1862–1937), Armenian general Agiya Nakhchivanli (1950), Azerbaijani politician Stepan Pachikov (1950), Russian software engineer Anwar Seyidov (1949–2025), Azerbaijani lawyer
See also Ashaghi Mahalla Synagogue Yukhari Mahalla Synagogue
References
External links