Гюлистан (крепость, Геранбойский район) — Википедия

RAFFI'S VISIT TO KARABAGH
At the end of his book Raffi gives a list of the authorities — histories and chronicles by monks, Varthapiets, and others, from whose writings he gathered materials for his history of the Five Meliks, and relates how he spent two months in 1881 visiting the five provinces and collecting all the information he could locally from the old inhabitants. From Gand- sak he went to Gulistan, where he spent a week with the descendants of the Beglarians, Sergei and Alexander Begs, visited their family burial- ground, deciphering the almost illegible inscriptions, and saw their half- ruined fortress of Gulistan, and the village churches with their wall- inscriptions. Thence to Chrapiert'h, where he saw in the church at Geda- shen (where Yusup and Emin fought their famous battle against the son of Shaverdi Khan, when Yusup wanted to run away and Emin shamed him into standing fast, p. 296) a beautiful MS. of the Gospels, at the end of which Melik Atham had written records of his family ; and visited Atham's half-ruined palace on the right bank of the river Tharthar, with historical inscriptions over the doors. At the village of Marthakierth he found an old man, over a hundred years of age, who knew Armenian, Persian, Arabic, and Turkman, and who had been interpreter to the last khans of Shushi, Ibrahim and Methi-khan (and later, in the same village, was a short time in the service of a German missionary). Raffi passed two whole days in taking down from his lips all that he could relate about the Khans of Shushi. In the province of Khachin he visited the splendid Vank of Gandtsasar, where, on the walls, he found a long in- scription about the Melik-Beglarians. In the same province he saw the Magpies' Fort, and visited Mirza-khan's village of Khanziristan, where, he says, he was so shockingly badly received that he only stayed there one hour ! At Shushi, to his disappointment, he found that important docu- ments from which he could have gained much information had been stolen by different persons. At Varranda he visited Shahnazar's " Gospel" village of Chanakhch ; from Varranda he went to Thizak, where he saw the burial ground of the Avanian Meliks, and found their old palace oc- cupied by a Mahomedan Beg, for one branch of the descendants of Avan had embraced the faith of Islam. Of the five Meliks the Beglarians are the only line who up to the present time managed to preserve some portion of their territories, owning 18 villages, all inhabited by Armenians, extending over large tracts of land.