A study prepared as part of the "Places of Memory of Western Azerbaijan" project examines the history of Gursali, an Azerbaijani village in present-day Armenia now known as Arjahovit. The village was left largely empty after its Azerbaijani residents were driven out in the late 1980s.
Report informs that Tsarist-era sources record the village as Kursali and Kursaly, while Soviet-era sources refer to it as Kursali. In December 1995, it was renamed Khursali. Official Armenian sources currently use two names for the village: Ghursal and Arjahovit. According to the study, the latter was adopted as part of a policy of Armenianization and the erasure of Azerbaijani heritage in Armenia. Since 1995, the village has been part of Lori Province of the Republic of Armenia.
From the second half of the 18th century, the territory of the village formed part of the Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti. During the Tsarist period, the village was part of the Alexandropol Uyezd of the Erivan Governorate. Tsarist-era statistical records, also cited in Armenian sources, indicate that at various times before 1908 the village was inhabited exclusively or predominantly by ancestors of the Azerbaijanis. In 1908, the village had 824 inhabitants, all of whom were ancestors of the Azerbaijanis.
Armenian sources indicate that the territory of the village was inhabited by Azerbaijanis until the late 1980s. The village had 1,040 inhabitants in 1931 and 1,314 in 1959, predominantly Azerbaijanis in both years. In 1989, the village had 69 inhabitants, all of whom were Azerbaijanis.
According to the book Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War by British journalist and Caucasus specialist Thomas de Waal, in November 1988, the Azerbaijani residents of Gursali were forcibly driven out under pressure from members of the Armenian SSR's security forces and armed groups.
Former resident of Gursali Samaya Huseynova recalled: "In November, an Armenian man came and said that… they would force the residents of the neighboring village to leave…, and that we had to move to Azerbaijan. We said that we would never go to Azerbaijan: we were born here. Everything we have is here – our property, our sheep, our home. So why should we go to Azerbaijan? He replied, 'You'll see – we'll sacrifice you in revenge for Sumgait.'"
The Erivan Governorate Memorial Book for 1902 mentions a mosque in the village, but it has not survived to the present day. Photographs from the 1960s also document a Muslim mausoleum that once stood in the cemetery in Gursali but was later destroyed.
Between 2021 and 2024, extensive fieldwork was conducted across the territory of Armenia, including in remote mountainous regions. The research was undertaken in preparation for the book The Perished Civilization and focused on identifying and documenting surviving Azerbaijani heritage sites. During the fieldwork, an Azerbaijani cemetery was discovered in the village. It contained damaged gravestones bearing Arabic inscriptions, some of which date to the early 20th century.