DAGESTAN TUR HUNTING IN AZERBAIJAN
In each Dagestan tur hunt, the client is guided by two guides, the hike takes 3 – 4 hours from base camp to the tented fly camp, where he will stay until he gets his trophy. Azerbaijan is the best destination for Dagestan (Eastern) Tur hunting.
DAGESTAN TUR HUNTING
Areas: Skeki, Ismayilli and Quba.
Duration: 9 day trip, with 5 hunting days.
Season: June 01 – November 30.
Weather: June – September, 50 – 8f, (10 – 30c). October – December, 23 – 75f, (-5 to + 20c).
Travel: Fly to Baku via Frankfurt or Istanbul.
Only in the far east of the Caucasus, in the Republic of Azerbaijan, you will find the home of the Eastern Tur, which is also known to international trophy hunters, as the Dagestan Tur.
With its horns similar, a goat like poise and its nature that of a cross between a sheep and a wild goat, the lack of any scientific research regarding the species, renders it further difficult for authorities to classify this game animal, but both species count for the Ovis and Capra Slams.
Dagestan Tur HUNT IN AZERBAIJAN
The word Dagestan is of Turkic and Persian origin. Dağ means ‘mountain’ in Turkic and -stan is a Persian suffix meaning ‘land’. The word Dagestan therefore means ‘the land of mountains’. Dagestan used to be called Kohestan ‘mountainous place’ in Persian and Arabized as Ghahestan. When the Persian language gradually faded in those regions and the Turkic language prevailed, the Persian koh (kuh in contemporary Persian) was replaced with its Turkic equivalent dagh. The present city transliterated as Derbent is from the Persian Darband, meaning a point on a mountain that one can not climb further. In Persian mysticism Darband is the place where Simorgh (Shahrokh or Phoenix) lives and is the end point and farthest point of the world that man can imagine. Some areas of Dagestan were known as Albania, Avaria, and Tarkov at various times.
With a population of 2,910,249, Dagestan is ethnically very diverse (it is Russia’s most heterogeneous republic, where no ethnicity forms a majority) with several dozen ethnicities and subgroups inhabiting the republic, most of which speakCaucasian and Turkic languages. Largest among these ethnicities are the Avar, Dargin, Kumyk, Lezgian, Laks, Azerbaijani,Tabasaran and Chechen. Ethnic Russians comprise about 3.6% of Dagestan’s total population. Russian is the primary official language and the lingua franca among the ethnicities.
Dagestan has been a scene of low-level Islamic insurgency, occasional outbreaks of separatism, ethnic tensions and terrorism since the 1990s. According to International Crisis Group, the militant Islamist organization Shariat Jamaat is responsible for much of the violence. Much of the tension is rooted in an internal Islamic conflict between traditional Sufigroups advocating secular government and more recently introduced Salafist teachers preaching the implementation of Sharia in Dagestan.