History
Zaqatala has several sites of historic significance, most of which are centered on its 19th-century town centre. The main square, formerly called Lenin Square, features a pair of 700 year old plane trees.
The city's most prominent feature is a ruined fortress, built in the 1830s by occupying Russian forces during the Caucasian War to defend the city from rebels. In the 1850s, the town was the site of battles between Russians and Dagestani leader Imam Shamil. It was center of Zakatala okrug (district) of Tiflis Governorate between 1860 and 1917. It was part of Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic between 1917 and 1918 and Georgian Democratic Republic between 1918 and 1921 before passing to Azerbaijan in March 1922.
In the 20th century the town and its fortress became more famous when the fortress was used as one of the prisons for the mutinous crew of the battleship Potëmkin, whose actions in the failed 1905 Revolution were a precursor to the eventual 1917 revolution. The statue of one of the mutineers erected in the Soviet era still decorates Heydar Aliyev park not far from the fortress. Currently, the fortress still houses a military garrison as well as several Soviet-style apartment buildings. Near the northern part of the ramparts and off of the main square is a beautiful, but abandoned, Georgian church. The town now sports a sizable new mosque.
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“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
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—Attributed to Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)