Vardan Voskanyan: Artificial Azerbaijan could rightfully be called 'Oghuzistan'

Iran specialist Vardan Voskanyan claims that the current state known as Azerbaijan has no historical roots under that name.

“While Baku's barbaric regime continues to use the fictitious term 'Western Azerbaijan' to refer to Armenia, the reality is that the modern artificial entity known as Azerbaijan has never historically borne that name. Moreover, the ancestors of the so-called titular nation had multiple forms of self-identification," he said in a social media post on Saturday.

“In particular, the author of The Book of Dede Korkut, a 16th-century manuscript preserved in Dresden and proclaimed as the 'national epic' of artificial Azerbaijan, explicitly refers to the language of his own work as 'the language of the Oghuz tribe’. This indicates that the ethnic group speaking this language was identified as Oghuz, not Azerbaijani.”

Voskanyan suggested that Baku’s regime should consider renaming the country to reflect its ethnolinguistic origins.

“To avoid falsifying history and dishonoring the memory of their ancestors, the barbaric regime in Baku could rightfully rename their artificial state as ‘Oghuzistan.’ And if the Persian-derived suffix '-stan' contradicts their pan-Turkic ideology, a more purely Turkic alternative would be 'Oghuz Yurdu' (Land of the Oghuz),” the expert added.