"Armenian-Iranian interactions date back to the depths of antiquity. At times, Armenia and Iran were friends and allies, even sharing common dynasties, and at other times fierce and unrelenting adversaries. Whatever their political relationship may have been, their commonalities in pre-Christian and pre-Islamic social structures and cultural attributes, including linguistic affiliation, are striking. The boundaries between the Iranian and Armenian worlds were porous in many ways. The Armenian presence in Iran is attested from the Achaemenid centuries to the present. In fact, the northernmost reaches of Persian Azarbayjan were once included in the region known historically as Greater Armenia. During the Arsacid, Sasanian, Arab, Seljuk, Turkmen, Mongol, Safavid, Qajar, and Pahlavi periods of dominance, Armenians were to be found in Persia/Iran as peasants, merchants, and even officials and warriors, and often as forcibly uprooted exiles from their native lands to the north. There were at one time hundreds of villages in Iran populated in whole or in part by Armenians, Now nearly all abandoned, their memory is entrusted to largely derelict churches and chapels from Qaradagh and Maku in the north to Urmia, Salmas, and Rasht, and further south to Peria, near Isfahan, and the Persian Gulf. Particularly famed is the municipality of Nor Jugha or New Julfa, adjacent to Isfahan, dating to the early seventeenth when Shah Abbas I deported countless thousands of Armenians from the mercantile city of Julfa on the Arax River and from throughout the plain of Ararat to Persia. Within one generation, New Julfa had become a thriving commercial center, with networks of trade extending to India and the East Indies in the east to Russia and Western Europe in the north. The Armenians were known to be skillful integrators of European models and Asiatic motives"--