“GEGHARD”
SCIENTIFIC ANALYTICAL
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2025
2025
The village of Kungut was one of the Armenian historical settlements in the Shaki region. It is located 30 km southeast of the regional center Shaki.
The Armenian population of the village was forcibly converted in the middle of the 18th century as a result of religious persecution by Haji Chalabi Khan of Shaki.
In 1874, Kungut had 1261 Muslim inhabitants who were of Armenian origin. As a village populated by Muslims, Kungut avoided the massacres carried out by the Turkish army that invaded the region in 1918.
As of 1976, Kungut had 1152 inhabitants who, although considering themselves Azerbaijanis, had retained many distorted Armenian names and surnames, as well as Armenian customs.
During a visit by monumentalist Samvel Karapetyan to the outskirts of the village, the ruins of the Armenian Holy Mother of God church were still preserved. Its architectural features allowed it to be dated to the 9th-10th centuries.
The famous topographer Makar Barkhutaryants, during his visit to the Surb Gevorg church in the village of Dashbulagh, which was Armenian populated until 1918, copied an inscription from an old cymbal that once belonged to the church of Kungut.
This cymbal is a memorial to the
Holy Mother of God church of Kungit,
Year (1695)
Apparently, the cymbal was brought here after the inhabitants of Kungut village converted to Islam.
As Makar Barkhutaryants testifies, the large cemetery adjacent to the Holy Mother of God church in Kungut was destroyed by the Islamized Armenians. Here, he managed to find and copy the inscription of only one preserved tombstone:
This is the tombstone of Khoja Saqar,
Son of Movses from Erzurum,
who died in 1686.
These scarce facts, nevertheless, allow us to assert that in the 17th century and until the religious conversion of the Armenian population, Kungut remained a settlement with a distinctly Armenian way of life.
The village is now called Bash Kyungyut.
Bibliography
Barkhutaryants M., Land of Aghvank and its Neighbors: Artsakh, Yerevan, 1999.
Karapetyan S., The Armenian Lapidary Inscriptions of Aghvank Proper, Yerevan, 1997.