"Azerbaijan’s state-backed historical revisionism reaches absurd extremes" by Carlo Coppola
Questo articolo di Carlo Coppola è apparso in versione italiana sul periodico "In Città Giovinazzo" diretto dal prof. Antonio Calisi al presente link:
Ադրբեջանը և պատմական կեղծ լուրերը. երբ ազգայնականությունը վերաշարադրում է անցյալը: Կառլո Կոպպոլայի հոդված.Azerbaijan is promoting a campaign of historical revisionism that borders on the grotesque. According to a number of Azerbaijani “scholars,” the Vikings, the Etruscans, the Trojans, and many other ancient peoples supposedly have Azerbaijani origins. This is not satire, but material presented as scientific research and disseminated through state-funded academic publications.
A striking example is a 2016 study published by a researcher at the Nasimi Institute of Linguistics of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences. The paper compares Etruscan personal names with ancient Turkic forms and predictably concludes that the Etruscans were of Turkic—and therefore Azerbaijani—origin. For the international scholarly community, such a methodology is entirely unfounded, given that the Etruscans were a civilization of the first millennium BCE on the Italian peninsula, with no historical or cultural connection to Turkic peoples.
Yet Azerbaijani historical creativity does not stop there. Drawing on the pseudo-theory of Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl—who claimed that the Vikings, and even Odin himself, originated from a land called “Azer”—Azerbaijan has gone so far as to proclaim itself the homeland of the Vikings. As Azerbaijani composer Galib Mamedov openly admitted, the strategy was deliberate: “We realized it was important to involve someone very famous, whose opinion would be accepted worldwide.”
Between 1981 and 2000, Heyerdahl visited Azerbaijan several times, conducting what he called “historical studies” despite having no professional training in history. His conclusions, personally welcomed by then-president Heydar Aliyev, asserted that the Vikings originated from the land of “Azer.” According to some observers, these visits may also have been linked to the interests of Norwegian oil companies operating in the region.
The most troubling aspect is the institutionalization of this pseudo-scientific narrative. On a Baku.TV program, “Dr.” Seyid Abbasov seriously claimed that Etruscan inscriptions were “written in ancient Turkic.” Iskender Tagiyev went even further, asserting that the ancestors of the Vikings traveled from Azerbaijan to Scandinavia by “sailing” some 12,000 years ago.
This raises an obvious question: what sources did these “scholars” consult during their “reflections” on Caucasian history? Certainly not Herodotus, the father of history, nor Xenophon or Strabo—classical historians and geographers who described the peoples of the Caucasus in detail without ever mentioning anything resembling these fantastical reconstructions. Instead, Azerbaijani academics tend to cite one another in a self-referential loop, often invoking figures such as Professor Yagub Mahmudov, Director of the Institute of History at the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS), who in turn fuels this chain of pseudo-research unsupported by classical historical sources.
This operation of historical falsification fits into a broader context: the artificial construction of an ancient Azerbaijani national identity. In reality, Azerbaijan as a modern state entity emerged only in 1918–1920. The need to invent millennia-old roots betrays the fragility of this identity-building project, attempting to fill with historical fantasies what documented history cannot provide. The next step, ironically, might be to declare even cold air as Azerbaijani.
Carlo Coppola
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