Deputy Speaker of Armenia’s National Assembly, Ruben Rubinyan, has responded on Facebook to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s statement that “there is no Lake Sevan, there is Lake Goycha.”
Rubinyan wrote: “If we go far enough back using maps, indeed, we won’t see the name Sevan, but rather the Geghama Sea or Gegharkunik Sea. And we won’t see Azerbaijan either. But there is no point in looking back. We must move forward. That’s precisely the meaning of the August 8 declaration.”
Earlier, President Aliyev had claimed that Russian imperial maps from the early 20th century clearly show that almost all place names in present-day Armenia are of Azerbaijani origin.
“There is no Lake Sevan, there is Lake Goycha. We didn’t create those maps, they were made by Tsarist Russia, which once relocated Armenians from Iran and Eastern Anatolia to Karabakh to alter the ethnic composition,” Aliyev stated.
