Alagyaz
| Alagyaz | |||
| State : |
 Armenia
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| Province : | Aragazotn | ||
| Coordinates : | 40 ° 41 ′ N , 44 ° 17 ′ E | ||
| Height : | 2100 m | ||
| Time zone : | UTC + 4 | ||
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Alagyaz ( Armenian Ալագյազ ), also Alagiaz, Elegez , until 1938 Mets Jamshlu (other transcriptions Mets Jamshlu, Mets Dzhamshlu ) is a village and a rural community ( hamaynkner ) in the northern Armenian province of Aragazotn , which is predominantly inhabited by Yazidis . The mountain village, which is over 2100 meters high, is considered the cultural center of the Yazidi minority of the province.
location
Alagyaz is located on the grassy plain of Tsaghkahovit , which connects to the northern slope of the 4090 meter high Aragaz mountain and is bordered in the north by the Pambak mountain range , which reaches an altitude of over 3000 meters. The place name Alagyaz is derived from an alternative name for the highest Armenian mountain. The sparsely populated highlands with long, cold winters and - apart from the months of July and August - year-round rainfall are mainly used as grazing land for sheep. Potatoes, corn and cabbage are grown in large fields. The area has been populated since the Bronze Age; the Urartians established in the 1st millennium BC Fortresses at Hnaberd, Tsaghkahovit (eight kilometers west of Alagyaz) and other places. About four kilometers west of Alagyaz rises the Vardablur, a grass hill at 2,376 meters high near the Yezidi village of the same name (638 inhabitants in 2012).
From Ashtarak , north of the state capital Yerevan , the M3 expressway leads past the east side of the Aragaz via Aparan to Alagyaz, 60 kilometers away, and a further 18 kilometers north over the 2378 meter high Spitak Pass ( Spitaki l-tsk ) to Spitak in the Province Lori . Spitak is located in the Pambak valley on the route between Gyumri in the west and Vanadzor in the east. The next village on the M3, about two kilometers northwest of Alagyaz, is Jamschlu with 285 inhabitants (2012). Three kilometers south of the M3 is Ria Taza (Rya Taza), another Yezidi village with 569 inhabitants (2012). In Alagyaz, the H21 coming from Artik , 29 kilometers away, joins the M3 from the west . At the end of a road 3.5 kilometers north of Alagyaz is the hamlet of Sipan with 236 Yazidi inhabitants (2012) at an altitude of 2121 meters. Finally, a little south of Alagyaz, a three kilometer long road branches off east to Charchakis (Derek), where the ruins of an early Christian church have been preserved.
Townscape
At the end of the 1980s, around 2500 people lived in the village. Because of the high unemployment after independence (1991), many residents emigrated to the cities or abroad. At the 2001 census, the official population was 469. According to official statistics, in January 2012 there were 509 inhabitants in Alagyaz. The center of the village is at the fork in the road, where there is a small grocery store. The farmsteads, some of which are surrounded by walls, consist of mostly single-storey houses covered with corrugated iron, brick stalls and board sheds. For the winter months, hay bales are piled high as fodder. The average size of private land holdings per family is 1.4 hectares.
Sheep cheese is mainly produced in one company for the needs of the local population. In the Soviet period there was a small house museum for Kurdish culture. The owner was a nurse and ran a health station in the same building, which together with the hospital in Tsaghkahovit looked after 20 surrounding villages. One theater showed, among other things, adaptations of the Kurdish national epic Mem û Zîn .
The secondary school in Alagyaz is one of the four schools in the province (along with Tllik, Shamiran and Ria Taza) where the majority of Yezidi-Kurdish students are taught. However, there is a lack of teachers and suitable teaching material in order to be able to offer enough hours in Yazidi language, i.e. in Kurmanji , outside of the usual curriculum . Kurmanji has been written in Latin instead of Cyrillic since the end of the Soviet era , which is why new school books had to be printed.
Most Kurdish Yazidis live in eleven of the 20 villages around Alagyaz. The first Yazidi families came from Anatolia to the Armenian territory that belonged to the Russian Empire during the unrest in the 1830s after the end of the Russo-Turkish War 1828–1829 . According to the 2001 census, the ethnic minorities in Armenia represent 2.16 percent of the country's population; the largest minority, the Yazidis, at around 40,000, make up 1.26 percent of the total population. After the middle of the 19th century, some Yazidis settled on the spot. The inhabitants of Alagyaz are mainly ethnic Yazidis and give Kurmanji as their mother tongue.
In several places in the vicinity of the place there are zoomorphic gravestones made of basalt , which depict sheep and horses and can reach life size. They are relics of the culture of immigrant Turkic peoples from northern Asia , which dates back to pre-Islamic times and which have been preserved in popular belief by Muslims, Armenian Christians and the local Yazidis and are widespread in the Caucasus region . There was a Muslim cemetery with similar animal figures in the southern Armenian village of Worotan until the 1970s . An anonymous mausoleum near Alagyaz also consists of basalt blocks. It has the basic square shape of a simple qubba with a semicircular dome. The entrance to the windowless room with thick walls is on the south side. In contrast to the places worshiped by Yazidis in northern Iraq, especially Lalish , this mausoleum, like other Yazidi mausoleums in Armenia, is not of religious importance, but serves solely as the burial place of a distinguished personality.
Web links
- Rick Ney: Aragatsotn March . Tour Armenia, 2008, p. 70
- Elegez. Kurdica
Individual evidence
- ↑ Brady Kiesling: Rediscovering Armenia Guidebook - Aragatsotn March . Armeniapedia
- ^ RA 2001 Population and Housing Census Results . armstat.am, p. 51
- ^ RA Aragatsotn March. armstat.am, 2012, p. 244
- ↑ Anja Mihr, Artur Mkrtichyan, Claudia Mahler, Reetta Toivanen (eds.): Armenia: A Human Rights Perspective for Peace and Democracy. Human Rights, Human Rights Education and Minorities . ( Memento from September 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) University of Potsdam, 2005, p. 115
- ↑ Hasmik Hovhannisyan: Kurds in Armenia. The cultural center of the Kurds living in Armenia has always been Alagyaz . ( Memento from April 15, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) fravahr.org, November 3, 2007
- Jump up ↑ Levon Yepiskoposian, Ashot Margarian, Laris Andonian, Armine Khudoyan, Ashot Harutyunian: Genetic Affinity between the Armenian Yezidis and the Iraqi Kurds. ( Memento from April 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) In: Iran and the Caucasus, 14, 2010, pp. 37–42, here p. 38
- ↑ Yezidi in Armenia through the lenses of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. ( Memento of May 8, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Public Foundation for European Comparative Minority Research, 2006, p. 15
- ↑ Estelle Amy de la Bretèque: Music & Anthropology. Armenia . (Photos)
- ^ AJT Bainbridge: Zoomorphic Tombstones. batsav.com
- ↑ Birgul Acikyildiz: The Yezidis: The History of a Community, Culture and Religion. (Library of Modern Religion) IB Tauris, London 2010, pp. 142, 163, ISBN 978-1848852747