Çatalköprü is a village in the

Ardahan District Ardahan District (also: ''Merkez'', meaning "central") is a district of Ardahan Province of Turkey. Its seat is the town Ardahan.Ardahan Province Ardahan Province ( tr, , ku, Parêzgeha Erdêxanê, ) is a province in the north-east of Turkey, bordering Georgia and Armenia. The provincial capital is the city of Ardahan. Demographics With 94,932 inhabitants in 2021, Ardahan was the third ...

Turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a list of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolia, Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with ...

. Its population is 218 (2022).

History

There is no information regarding the establishment of the village, which is located within the historical region of Tao-Klarceti. The area in which Çatalköprü is located passed between the

Kingdom of Georgia The Kingdom of Georgia ( ka, საქართველოს სამეფო, tr), also known as the Georgian Empire, was a medieval Eurasian monarchy that was founded in circa 1008 AD. It reached its Golden Age of political and economic ...

and the

Seljuk Turks The Seljuk dynasty, or Seljukids ( ; fa, سلجوقیان ''Saljuqian'', alternatively spelled as Seljuqs or Saljuqs), also known as Seljuk Turks, Seljuk Turkomans "The defeat in August 1071 of the Byzantine emperor Romanos Diogenes by the Turk ...

through the Middle Ages, until it came under Ottoman rule, under which it remained until the 20th century. It was considered a large village, containing 59 families, by 1595. Although under Ottoman rule, Çatalköprü remained culturally Georgian at this time. However, a 1723 census records that the village was owned by brothers named Mehmed, Mustafa, Hüseyin, and Osman, suggesting that by this point it had become Islamified or, at least, had come under direct Muslim ownership. The village was occupied by the Russians during the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War, during which time the village consisted of roughly 40 households. An 1888 census records a population of 487, all of whom it records as Turkish. By 1917, the Georgian researcher Konstantine Martvileli, on his visit to the Ardahan region, found the village to have been abandoned. Following the collapse of the

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. ...

, the village came within the territory of the short-lived

Democratic Republic of Georgia The Democratic Republic of Georgia (DRG; ka, საქართველოს დემოკრატიული რესპუბლიკა ') was the first modern establishment of a republic of Georgia, which existed from May 1918 to ...

; in the wake of the Red Army's invasion of Georgia, the Treaty of Moscow, signed on March 16, 1921, included the village within the borders of

. A village with the name of Çatalköprü had been re-established by 1933.

Population

References

Villages in Ardahan District {{Ardahan-geo-stub