List of mosques in Armenia

The following is a list of mosques found within the territory of modern Armenia.

Minaret of the Urban Mosque in Erivan

History
The 19th-century Abbas Mirza Mosque

According to the Caucasus Calendar of 1870, a statistical report published by the Russian Viceroyalty of the Caucasus, there were a total of 269 Shia mosques in the territory of Erivan Governorate, most of which now comprises Armenia.[1] According to Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, by the turn of the twentieth century, the population of Erivan was over 29,000; of this number 49% were Azerbaijanis; 48% were Armenians; and 2% were Russians, and there were seven Shia mosques in the town.[2]

After 1917, many of the city's religious buildings were demolished in accordance with the Soviet government's modernization and anti-religious policies.[3] In 1990, a mosque in Yerevan was pulled down with a bulldozer in an effort to tear down traces of Azerbaijani culture in Yerevan, following a nationalist movement by the Armenians and the rising tensions following the outbreak of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War.[4][5]During 1988-1994 the overwhelming majority of the Muslim population, consisting of Azeris and Muslim Kurds, fled the country as a result of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War and the ongoing conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Another Islamic site, the Blue Mosque (where most of the worshippers had been Azeri since the 1760s) has since been often referred to as the "Persian mosque" intending to rid Armenia of the Azeri trace by a "linguistic sleight of hand".[6][7]

That the Armenians could erase an Azerbaijani mosque inside their capital city was made easier by a linguistic sleight of hand: the Azerbaijanis of Armenia can be more easily written out of history because the name “Azeri” or “Azerbaijani” was not in common usage before the twentieth century. In the premodern era, these people were generally referred to as “Tartars,” “Turks,” or simply “Muslims.” Yet they were neither Persians nor Turks; they were Turkic-speaking Shiite subjects of the Safavid Dynasty of the Iranian Empire—in other words, the ancestors of people whom we would now call “Azerbaijanis.” So when the Armenians refer to the “Persian mosque” in Yerevan, that name obscures the fact that most of the worshippers there, when it was built in the 1760s, would have been, in effect, Azerbaijanis.

— Thomas de Waal, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War


In Yerevan
Blue Mosque, Yerevan

After the capture of Yerevan by Russians as result of the Russo-Persian War, the main mosque in the fortress, built by Turks in 1582, was converted to an Orthodox church under the orders of the Russian commander, General Ivan Paskevich. The church was sanctified on December 6, 1827 and named the Church of the Intercession of the Holy Mother of God.[8]

According to Ivan Chopin, there were eight mosques in Yerevan in the middle of the nineteenth century:

Of those mosques, the Blue Mosque is the only one that survives. Most of them were abandoned during Soviet times. According to 1869 data, there were a total of 60 mosques in Erivan uyezd of Erivan Governorate.[11]

See also

References
  1. Кавказский календарь на 1870 год. Тифлис, типография Главного Управления Наместника Кавказского. 1869. p. 392.
  2. (in Russian) Erivan in the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1890-1907.
  3. Ritter, Markus. "The Lost Mosque(s) in the Citadel of Qajar Yerevan: Architecture and Identity, Iranian and Local Traditions in the Early 19th Century," Iran and the Caucasus 13 (2009): p. 244.
  4. Robert Cullen, A Reporter at Large, “Roots,” The New Yorker, April 15, 1991, p. 55
  5. Thomas, de Waal (2003). Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War. United Kingdom: NYU Press. p. 79. ISBN 0-8147-6032-5.
  6. "Armenia tries to present Azerbaijanis' Blue Mosque as Iranian".
  7. de Waal, Thomas (2003). Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War. United Kingdom: NYU Press. p. 80. ISBN 0-8147-6032-5.
  8. Potto, Vasily Aleksandrovich (2000). Кавказская война. Том 3. Персидская война 1826-1828 гг. MintRight Inc. p. 359. ISBN 5425080999.
  9. Chopin, Jean-Marie (1852). Исторический памятник состояния Армянской области в эпоху ея присоединения к Российской Империи. Императорская Академия Наук. p. 468.
  10. Bournoutian, George A. (1992). The Khanate of Erevan under Qajar rule, 1795-1828. Mazda Publishers. p. 173. ISBN 0939214180.
  11. Voronov, N. I. (1869). Сборник статистических свѣдѣній о Кавказѣ. Т.1 (in Russian). Императорское русское географическое общество. Кавказскій отдѣл. p. 71.
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