Kars

Kars (Armenian: Կարս Kars, Azerbaijani: Qars, Kurdish: Qers) is a city in northeast Turkey and the capital of Kars Province. The population of the city is 73,826 as of 2010. As Chorzene, the town appears in Roman historiography (Strabo) as part of ancient Armenia. For the etymological origin of the name "Kars", some sources claim it is derived from the Georgian word ყარსი ("kari"), meaning "the gate" while other sources claim it is from the Armenian word "հարս" ("hars") which means bride. In recent years, the Georgian etymology, along with the Turkish one offered by M. Fahrettin Kırzıoğlu, has been dismissed as unsustainable by scholars. Little is known of the early history of Kars beyond the fact that it had its own dynasty of...