Julfa

Old Julfa occupied a narrow rocky strip on the left bank of the Aras, southeast of Nakhchivan. In the sixteenth century it became an important Armenian centre for the raw-silk trade. Routes connecting Tabriz, Yerevan, Erzurum and Tbilisi attracted settlers and merchants, while dated cemetery monuments preserve evidence of the town's growth. Its commercial relationships extended across political frontiers.

That prosperity ended abruptly during the Ottoman–Safavid war. Shah Abbas I passed through Julfa in 1603 and received the hospitality of its merchants. Faced with an Ottoman counter-offensive the following year, he withdrew using a scorched-earth policy. Julfa was demolished and its inhabitants forced across the Aras into Iran in the autumn of 1604. The displaced community re-established itself at New Julfa beside Isfahan in 1605, carrying its commercial experience into a new setting under Safavid supervision. Old Julfa's history thereafter bore the rupture of forced removal: the merchant network continued, while the riverbank town from which it had developed was destroyed.