Zagem

Zagem or Bazari (Georgian: ბაზარი) was a town in the southeast Caucasus, in the eastern Georgian kingdom of Kakheti. It flourished from the 15th to the 17th century as a vibrant commercial and artisanal centre. It became a dependency of the Safavid Persian province of Ganja-Karabakh in the 1550s. The fortunes of the town were reversed by Safavid military actions in the area in 1615. By the 1720s, the town had been reduced to an insignificant hamlet. The settlement was located in what is now the Zaqatala District of Azerbaijan, but no evidence of the town remains at the site. The toponym Zagem is found exclusively in non-Georgian sources; Georgians knew it as Bazari, meaning "bazaar".

Called Bazari ("bazaar") in the Georgian sources, the town was variously known to the Persian authors as Zagam, Zagham, or Zakam, and to the European accounts as Zagem, Zagen, Zagain, Zegharn, or Seggen. The non-Georgian forms are probably related to the toponym tsagam (цагъам), meaning "a blackberry bush" in Lezgian, a language of the neighboring mountainous tribe. The town lay in the river plain of Alazani (Qanıx), on the left bank of that river, in the present-day Qax District of Azerbaijan, where a homonymous village is still found some 25 km south of the city of Zaqatala, close to the border with Georgia.

The town named Bazari is first documented in Georgian sources in 1392. Owing to its location on a road from Gremi in Kakheti to the neighboring country of Shirvan and proximity to major regional trade routes, as well as due to relative peace and stability achieved by the Bagratid kings of Kakheti, the town of Bazari/Zagem became an important regional commercial and crafts centre, settled by the Georgian, Jewish, Armenian, and Muslim communities. In the 16th century, it emerged as the economic capital of Kakheti and home to a royal residence. Not infrequently, for the contemporary Persian and Turkish sources, "the ruler of Zagam" was a synonym to the king of Kakheti. In the 1550s, the Safavid military leader and official Qalich Beg, son of Oveys Beg Pazuki, assumed the governorship over the town, and ruled for nine years.

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