Armavir

Armavir stands on the left bank of the Kuban River where the Urup joins it, at a crossing from the Pontic steppe into the northern foothills of the Caucasus. Before the town existed, Abazins and other Circassian communities used the surrounding grassland for pasture and movement. Tatars from the Crimean Khanate later settled in the area, and the Kuban became a contested frontier between steppe powers and highland societies.

By the seventeenth century, Islam had spread among the Adyghe and the Circassian political order was changing. Armenian communities known as Cherkesogai had long lived among them but retained their own church and commercial networks. They feared losing their religious identity and, at the end of 1836, asked the commander of the Russian Kuban Line for protection and land near Russian settlements.

The Kuban itself was the edge of the Russian frontier. Since the 1790s Cossacks had held a chain of forts along the river, the Kuban Line, facing the Circassian lands across it.