Sığnaq


Sighnag or Sghnakh is a village in the Khojaly District of Azerbaijan. The village had an ethnic Armenian-majority population prior to the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, and also had an Armenian majority in 1989.

History

During the Soviet period, the village was a part of the Askeran District of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast. After the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, the village was administrated as part of the Askeran Province of the breakaway Republic of Artsakh. The village was captured by Azerbaijan on 9 November 2020 during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war.
In early July 2021, satellite images released by Caucasus Heritage Watch, a watchdog group made up of researchers from Purdue and Cornell, revealed that an Armenian cemetery dating back to the eighteenth century was bulldozed in order to make way for a new road. This makes it the "second historic cemetery destroyed along the new Fuzuli-Shusha road, after Mets T’agher/Böyük Tağlar."

Historical heritage sites

Historical heritage sites in and around the village include the 19th-century church of Surb Astvatsatsin, a 19th-century cemetery, and a spring monument built in 1949.

Demographics

The village had 251 inhabitants in 2005, and 292 inhabitants in 2015.