Ağrı

Ağrı, formerly known as Karaköse (Kurdish: Qerekose‎)^[3] from the early Turkish republican period until 1946, and before that as Karakilisa (also rendered as Karakilise) (Ottoman: قره‌کلیسا), is the capital of Ağrı Provinceat the eastern end of Turkey, near the border with Iran.

In the Ottoman Empire era the area was called Şorbulak.^{[citation needed]} The current town centre was founded around 1860 by a group of Armenian merchants from Bitlis with the name Karakilise ("the black church") that became known to the local population as Karakise and this version was turned officially to Karaköse at the beginning of the Republican era. This name was changed to Ağrı by 1946.^[4]

In the medieval period, the district's administrative centre was located at Alashkert, once an important town. The "kara kilise" that gave the town its name was a medieval Armenian church. In 1895 Lynch stayed in Karakilise and wrote that it had between 1500-2000 inhabitants, was nearly two-thirds Armenian, and that a barracks for a locally-recruited Kurdish Hamidiyeh regiment had been recently located in the town.^[5]

The Armenian population of the town and surrounding valley was massacred during the Armenian Genocide: a New York Times report from March 1915 talks of the Alashkert valley being covered with the bodies of men, women, and children

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