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People Have Been Arguing About Nakhchivan Since 'The Flood'

In this week's Maphead, Ken Jennings explores the autonomous republic of Nakhchivan, an exclave the size of Delaware that's been a bone of contention between the region's powers for centuries.
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We use the word "enclave" colloquially, when we're looking for a place to curl up and hide, but a true enclave or "exclave" can be a bit more complicated. To geographers, an exclave is a portion of some country or territory that's separated from the main part by intervening territory belonging to someone else. Typically exclaves are very small (like Cabinda, a tiny oil-rich corner of Africa, or Nahwa, a speck of the UAE, sitting in the middle of Omani territory).

A few exclaves are much larger—like Alaska. It's bigger than most countries, but it's separated from the rest of the United States by miles and miles of rugged Canadian terrain. But Alaska isn't an "enclave"—it has a coastline, and it's not surrounded by Canada. Americans can take a cruise ship there without very polite Canadian border control folks getting involved. So what's the world's largest true exclave, a landlocked one? For that, we have to head to the Caucasus Mountains of Central Asia.

Azerbaijan has an exclave the size of Delaware.

The former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan border each other in the southern Caucasus, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Armenia lies to the west of Azerbaijan, but here's the weird thing: There's a big second slice of Azerbaijan sitting to the southwest of Armenia, on the Iranian and Turkish border. This is the mountainous Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, and it's been a bone of contention between the region's powers for centuries.

People have been arguing about Nakhchivan since the Flood.

Nakhchivan's name means "place of descent," a reference to the tradition that the family of the biblical Noah settled the area after his ark came to rest on Mt. Ararat nearby. Nakhchivan ping-ponged back and forth between the Persians, Ottomans, and Russians for hundreds of years. It's long been a majority-Muslim area, like Azerbaijan, but under the Tsar, many Armenian Christians resettled there fleeing the Persians and Turks. As a result, both Azerbaijan and Armenia claimed the region as part of their national map. In 1918, after occupying British authorities gave Nakhchivan to Armenia, a local military hero tried to secede, and the region was briefly declared the independent Republic of Aras. Finally, in a 1920 Soviet referendum, Nakhchivan voted overwhelmingly to join Azerbaijan.

By closing a border, Armenia can cut Azerbaijan in two.

So, to this day, Nakhchivan is an exclave separated by a 30- to 50-mile-wide strip of Armenian territory from the rest of its country. This was trouble during the recent Azeri-Armenian border wars, when Armenia blockaded Nakhchivan from the rest of Azerbaijan. Only two small bridges built over the Aras River to Iran saved the exclave from starvation. Today, tree-planting is a popular obsession in the republic, to replace the forests burned for fuel by freezing Nakhchivanis during the siege.

Nakhchivan has rebranded as progressive tech capital—for now.

Since the shooting ended with a 1994 ceasefire, money has poured into Nakhchivan from newly oil-rich Azerbaijan, making it a booming center for organic farming, eco-tourism, and high-tech reforms like universal Wi-Fi. The locals are proudly patriotic Azeris, claiming not just Noah for themselves, but also the origins of Azerbaijan's national flag, its national epic, and its former strongman president Heydar Aliyev. But as in any exclave, security is precarious. Nakhchivan is forever caught between larger powers, and its future is only assured as long as the clashes with Armenia don't heat up again, and as long as Iran doesn't decide to annex Azerbaijan.

Explore the world's oddities every week with Ken Jennings, and check out his book Maphead for more geography trivia.