Yerevan §

From khanate capital to national centre

Yerevan was still the Erivan khanate's principal city when the Treaty of Turkmenchay transferred Erivan and Nakhichevan from Qajar Persia to the Russian Empire in 1828. George Bournoutian's reconstruction of the 1827 Russian kameralnoe opisanie puts the city at roughly 30% Armenian and 70% Muslim before the post-war migration from Tabriz, Khoy, Salmas and other Iranian districts Bournoutian. The point is not that Yerevan was ethnically fixed, but that imperial conquest changed the administrative frame in which older Armenian and Muslim urban communities were counted, taxed and resettled. editorial

By the late imperial period the city was mixed again in a different way. The 1897 imperial census recorded Armenian and Azerbaijani, then usually tabulated as "Tatar", shares close enough to make Yerevan neither an exclusively Armenian nor an exclusively Muslim city 1897 census. The twentieth century transformed that balance. Genocide survivors from Ottoman Armenia, Soviet urbanisation, the capital status of the Armenian SSR, and the late-Soviet displacement of Azerbaijanis from Armenia made Yerevan overwhelmingly Armenian by 1989 1989 census.

Yerevan matters in the atlas because it is both a place and an argument. Armenian political memory reads it as the surviving eastern capital after the loss of Van, Kars, Erzurum and other western centres in the Armenian Genocide. Azerbaijani state historiography often uses the city's nineteenth-century Muslim plurality to argue that modern Armenia was built through demographic engineering. The demographic table is therefore not background colour. It is one of the places where competing historical claims become measurable and testable. contested