The Digorsky People's Court: an Experiment in the System of Justice in the Central Caucasus in the Second Half of the 1840s

The article is devoted to the history of the Armenian communities of Western (Zakuban) Circassia during the second half of the 18th – first half of the 19th centuries. The genesis of the Armenian national minority (Cherkesogai) is considered in close connection with the course of military and political events in the Crimean Khanate, the Ottoman territories in Crimea and the North-West Caucasus, and Western Circassia. The resettlement of Armenian families from Crimea to the Circassians, which took place against the backdrop of the collapse of the Crimean Khanate and the increasing frequency of Russian-Turkish wars,
de facto and de jure was a resettlement from one Ottoman territory to another Ottoman territory (the border between the Russian and Ottoman Empires ran along the Azov-Mozdok line from 1777 to 1791, then along the Kuban – until 1829). Another thesis of this article is that the relations between the Armenians and the
Adyges were of a good-neighborly nature and the founding of the Trans-Kuban Armenian aul (Armavir) in 1839 cannot be rightly considered as an operation to save Christians from an allegedly hostile and fanatical Muslim environment.