Zangezur §

Southern hinge of the Armenian-Azerbaijani map

Zangezur, broadly corresponding to modern Syunik in southern Armenia, is the narrow mountain region between Nakhichevan, Karabakh and Iran. Its political importance is disproportionate to its population because it decides whether Armenia has a continuous southern frontier with Iran and whether Azerbaijan has a direct land link to Nakhichevan. That geographic fact explains why Zangezur appears in the atlas as a battlefield in 1918–21, a Soviet border problem in 1921, and the centre of the post-2020 "Zangezur corridor" dispute. editorial

The imperial and early republican region was mixed. Armenian villages, Muslim Azerbaijani and Kurdish villages, seasonal pastoralism and contested roads made Zangezur less a compact national territory than a mountain contact zone. During the collapse of empire, Andranik Ozanian and later Garegin Nzhdeh treated the region as the military shield between the new Armenian republic and Azerbaijani claims over Karabakh and Nakhichevan. The 1918–20 campaigns destroyed or emptied many Muslim villages; de Waal records the Muslim population collapsing from roughly 120,000 in 1916 to only a remnant by the early Soviet period de Waal. Azerbaijani memory reads this as foundational ethnic cleansing. Armenian memory often reads the same episode as defensive consolidation after Ottoman advance and Baku Armenian massacres. Both framings omit something when used alone. contested

Zangezur remained inside Soviet Armenia after the Bolshevik settlement, while Nakhichevan became an Azerbaijani exclave under treaty guarantee and Karabakh was placed inside Soviet Azerbaijan. That three-part settlement made the region a permanent hinge. In 2021–24, Azerbaijani demands for a corridor through Syunik turned Zangezur from historical terrain into an active sovereignty question. Armenia's counter-position, expressed through Crossroads of Peace, accepts transit but rejects extraterritorial passage. The distinction is the political core: transit connects states, extraterritorial corridors cut through them. editorial