Two days ago I placed a few pictures on my blog and asked if anyone knew where they could have been taken, what they depicted and to what historical period they referred. Unfortunately, nobody answered correctly, so I am solving the quiz now.

The photos were taken in the town of Lerik in southern Azerbaijan, close to the Iranian border. They depict a medieval Muslim cemetery from the 14th -15th centuries where most gravestones are in the form of a sheep.

It seems to have little in common with Turkmenistan and the Turkmen history. However… The graveyard is a vestige of two powerful state formations: Ak Koyunlu (state of the so-called White Sheep Turkomans) and Kara Koyunlu (state of the so-called Black Sheep Turkomans). Both competing states occupied the territory of today’s Azerbaijan, Armenia, northern Iran and Iraq and eastern part of Turkey between the 14th and the 16th centuries.

The Turkomans descended from the Oghuz Turks, who came to the Caucasus and Middle East from Central Asia. Similarly to the contemporary Turkmen, they considered Oghuz Khan as their mythical founding father. Therefore, the White and Black Sheep Turkomans can be called relatives of the Turkmen, whose ancestors came from the Altai mountains and settled on the territory of today’s Turkmenistan and thus laid the origins of the contemporary Turkmen nation. Another group of the Oghuz migrated further west and later became the backbone of the Turkic nations living in Azerbaijan, Turkey, Iran and Iraq.

The cemetery is not the only relic of its kind in the region. Unfortunately, the Lerik graveyard as well as other similar necropoles scattered in southern Azerbaijan are gradually turning into ruins. The Azerbaijani and the Turkmen both stress their common ancestry. It would be good, though, if they not only remembered about it, but also took care of the common historical heritage.