Postage stamps, like banknotes, are one of the attributes of statehood. Three Transcaucasian nations are represented on the stamp above. More specifically, these nations are Georgians, Armenians, and Turks.
The absence of Azerbaijanis on this stamp may seem odd only to people unfamiliar with history, as well as to residents of the Republic of Azerbaijan from whom the authorities are carefully hiding their own history.
The reason for the absence of the word “Azerbaijani” on the stamp is simple – in 1933, the nation called “Azerbaijanis” did not exist yet. Azerbaijanis, called the “Caucasian Tatars” or the “Transcaucasian Turks” before the revolution, received their artificial ethnonym only with the adoption of the USSR Constitution in 1937.
And the name of Azerbaijan itself – a state created in 1918 by the troops of Anatolian (Ottoman) Turks – was borrowed from the Azerbaijan Province in Northern Iran populated by Turkic-speaking Persians.
How a promise made to genocide survivors was traded away for peace with Ankara —…
A Fragment That Traveled Across Continents The gilt-silver medallion shown above — two richly dressed…
Few episodes in ancient Armenian history capture the imagination quite like the tradition that Hannibal…
Five angles of one small bronze figure — and what emerges is not an abstract…
Introduction Among the successor states that emerged from the fragmentation of the Achaemenid-derived Orontid (Armenian:…
Article based on the explanations and interpretive observations of Angela Terian, with additional archaeological and…