Aşağı Ağcakənd
Aşağı Ağcakənd is a village in the Goranboy Rayon of Azerbaijan. The municipality consists of the villages of Aşağı Ağcakənd, Yuxarı Ağcakənd and Meşəli.
In antiquity the territory was a part of Artsakh; in the Middle Ages it was part of the principality of Khachen; in the 17-18th centuries the territory formed part of Melik-Abovian dynasty's Melikdom of Gulistan, with its capital in the fortress of that name.
During Soviet times, the area was renamed after the Armenian Bolshevik Stepan Shaumian, its administrative center, previously the Armenian village of Nerkishen or Nerkinshen taking the same name. By the 1990s, the population of Shaumian district was almost exclusively Armenian by language and ethnicity, though the area was not included within the boundaries of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast by the Soviet Union. In the spring-summer of 1991, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev ordered the execution of Operation Ring, in which the Soviet Red Army surrounded some of the area's Armenian villages and violently deported their inhabitants to the Armenian SSR. Approximately 17,000 Armenians living in Shaumian's twenty-three villages were expelled from the region.
In December 1991, with the Soviet Union imploding, Shaumian was claimed by the Armenian army and became the flashpoint of considerable fighting. This reached a climax in summer 1992 when most of the area was taken by the Azerbaijani army. Damage was severe and the Armenian population fled. Shaumian was renamed to Aşağı Ağcakənd in 1992, and the town has since been partly re-populated by Azerbaijani refugees and internally displaced persons.
