Translation of the current official name of the settlement means "Saint Nino" in English and it was given to the town in honor of the illuminator of Georgians St. Nino, in 1991.[citation needed]
Before 1991, the town of Ninotsminda was called Bogdanovka (Russian: Богдановка) - a name going back to the history of the Doukhobor settlement in the region in the 1840s.[2][3] After the conquest of Kars in 1878, some Doukhobors from Bogdanovka moved to the newly created Kars Oblast. Twenty years later, some of them (or their descendants) emigrated from Kars Oblast to Canada, where they established a short-lived village named Bogdanovka in Langham district of Saskatchewan.[4] Another group of emigrants, coming straight from Georgian Bogdanovka, established another Bogdanovka near Pelly, Saskatchewan.[5]
In Soviet Union, Doukhobor population of the region was in comparatively favorable conditions, isolated from attention of civil officials as population of ethnically mixed borderline region. In the 1990s, following the collapse of Soviet Union and rise of nationalist pressure (both local Armenian and state-imposed Georgian), a significant part of remaining Russian settlers abandoned their homes to settle in Russia.[6][7][8]
^ ab"Population Census 2014". www.geostat.ge. National Statistics Office of Georgia. November 2014. Retrieved 28 June 2021.
^Hedwig Lohm, "Dukhobors in Georgia: A Study of the Issue of Land Ownership and Inter-Ethnic Relations in Ninotsminda rayon (Samtskhe-Javakheti)". November 2006. Available in EnglishArchived 2010-06-02 at the Wayback Machine and RussianArchived 2010-09-02 at the Wayback Machine
Georgia (country)
