Oğuz (city)

Oğuz (transliterated, Oghuz) is a city and municipality in, and the capital of, the Oghuz Rayon of Azerbaijan Republic. The city was known as Vartashen until 1991 and was renamed to Oğuz in 1991.

Oğuz
City & Municipality
Coat of arms
Oğuz
Coordinates: 41°04′15″N 47°27′30″E
Country Azerbaijan
RayonOğuz
Established1968
Elevation
630 m (2,070 ft)
Population
 (2010)[1]
 • Total7,002
Time zoneUTC+4 (AZT)
 • Summer (DST)UTC+5 (AZT)
Area code(s)+994 024

Etymology

The name Oğuz given to the town in 1930 was taken from the old Turkic tribe of Oghuz. But before the 1930 it was called Vartashen, because Azerbaijan was the Russian Empire province.

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 Apostolic Church and had Armenian surnames. During the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the Udis as well as the Armenians were expelled to Armenia. Some 50 Udi people remained in the town.[2]

There were also Tat-speaking Mountain Jews in Vartashen. Most of them have emigrated to Israel, but possibly 80 have stayed.[3][4]

Twin towns — sister cities

Oghuz is twinned with:

References
  1. World Gazetteer: Azerbaijan Archived June 22, 2011, at the Wayback Machine – World-Gazetteer.com
  2. Wolfgang Schulze: Towards a History of Udi. International Journal of Diachronic Linguistics 1, 2005, pp. 55–91.
  3. Sarah Marcus: Mountain Jews. Tablet, Tbilisi, 18. Januar 2018.
  4. 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.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.