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Nakhchivan
Azerbaijan's landlocked exclave between Armenia, Iran and Turkey
Nakhchivan is a self-governing republic of Azerbaijan that does not touch Azerbaijan at all. Armenia lies between it and the rest of the country, and for more than three decades the direct road and railway across Armenian territory have been closed, so people and goods travel by air or loop south through Iran. The exclave has its own parliament and constitution within Azerbaijan, a tiny border with Turkey, and a dry, mountainous landscape dotted with medieval mausoleums. It is also the ancestral home of Azerbaijan's ruling Aliyev family. Since 2025, Nakhchivan has been at the center of a US-brokered plan to reopen a transit route across southern Armenia, which could end its isolation for the first time since the Soviet collapse.
The Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic covers about 5,500 square kilometers on the north bank of the Aras River, which forms its long border with Iran. Armenia borders it to the north and east along the Zangezur Mountains, and a short frontier of under 20 kilometers in the northwest touches Turkey. Most of the roughly 460,000 people counted in the 2019 census live in irrigated valleys along the Aras and in the capital, Nakhchivan city. The land rises from hot, arid plains to peaks above 3,900 meters, with the cleft summit of Ilandag a local landmark. Azerbaijani troops and border guards secure the exclave, while Armenia's Syunik province, only about 40 kilometers wide at its narrowest, separates it from mainland Azerbaijan. Bridges over the Aras link it by road to Iran.
Contested between Armenians and Azerbaijanis after the Russian Empire collapsed, Nakhchivan was assigned to Soviet Azerbaijan under the 1921 Treaties of Moscow and Kars, with Turkey as a guarantor of its status, and became an autonomous republic in 1924. When war broke out over Nagorno-Karabakh around 1990, Soviet-era rail links through Armenia were cut. At a White House summit on 8 August 2025, the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan initialed a peace agreement and endorsed a transit route through Syunik, branded the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). Armenia and the United States signed a framework in June 2026 for a joint venture, 74 percent US-held, to build it under Armenian jurisdiction, and Armenia's Constitutional Court approved it in September 2026. As of October 2026 the peace treaty itself remains unsigned, with Azerbaijan seeking changes to Armenia's constitution.