Until the mid-18th century, the territory of the Fizuli region was part of the Armenian principality of Dizak (together with the neighboring Jebrail region), and its population consisted almost exclusively of Armenians. This is now testified by the ruins of ancient Armenian churches and cemeteries in the vicinity of the city.
In the second half of the 18th century, the nomadic Turkic Shahsevan tribe settled here, and the local power passed into the hands of Turkic tribes. As a result, many Armenian areas would be renamed in a Turkic fashion.
One small Armenian settlement was renamed Karabulag.
The village of Karabulag with its population of 75 people, of which 70 were Armenians (93%), entered the Elisabethpol Governorate of the Russian Empire in 1810.
In 1827, the village was renamed Karyagino in honor of Colonel Pavel Karyagin, a participant in the Russian-Turkish War of 1768-1774 and the Russian-Persian War of 1804-1813. In the same year, 1827, Karyagino received the status of a city.
100 years later, in 1912, the population of the Karyagino district center was 550 people, of which 400 were Russians (73%) and 130 were Armenians (24%).
In 1918, Turkish troops invaded Karyagino and killed all the Russians and Armenians living in the city. In 1922, 4 years after the Turkish massacre, the population of Karyagino was only 20 people, all Azerbaijanis. And starting from the 1940s, Karyagino has been actively settled by thousands of Azerbaijanis.
In 1959, it was decided to rename Karyagino Fizuli.
By the beginning of the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) conflict in 1989, the population of Fizuli had become 22,779 people. Recall that in 1922, the number of Azerbaijanis here had been 20, and this number increased to nearly 23,000 in around 70 years.
This population growth was due to exclusively artificial settlement. It was in the Soviet years when villages were built for the nomadic Shahsevens who lived in the Fizuli region.
So, the Armenian land of Dizak slowly but surely lost its Armenian population and became “Azerbaijani”.
During the years of the Artsakh war, neighboring Armenian villages in the Hadrut region were bombarded from Fizuli. However, in a counterattack of the Artsakh Defense Army in 1993, the territory was finally returned to Artsakh. Hundreds of Artsakh children died to liberate this region.
Fizuli was renamed Varanda.
Now, almost nobody lives in the former Karyagino. If it weren’t for the Turkish massacre of 1918, 11 thousand people would live here only thanks to natural growth and urbanization, of which 8 thousand would be Russians, 2,6 thousand would be Armenians, and 400 would be Azerbaijanis. However, the city is now completely empty.
Today, Azerbaijan demands the return of the “Azerbaijani” Fizuli region. Have they even bothered to study the history of the region?
