Thank you Ian and Jim, I am very grateful to hear that you found my research interesting!
In terms of the Kurdish-Armenian yatagans, although I doubt that they hail from this region in particular im sure they come from somewhere nearby in Anatolia that undoubtedly had a very similar social situation. It's clear much more research is needed to finally seal the deal on those, but as I understand it this forum was instrumental in finding the true origins of Laz Bichaqs, so hopefully, if there is enough interest that case can finally be closed someday in the future!
Although Khevsur martial culture and their system of Parikaoba dueling was far more robust, I nonetheless agree that there are some striking parallels. This could also just be due to their very similar circumstances, being extremely isolated mountain folk who carefully preserved ancient traditions and always were quick to defend their traditional autonomy. In the case of the Khevsurs, they were constantly being attacked by the neighboring Kist people, which explains why their martial culture was much more developed.
Although they are more related to the ethnographic side of this presentation rather than the discussion on the weapons themselves, I wanted to bring up two other extremely important elements of the local martial culture. The traditional epic "Daredevils of Sasun" and the local ancient war dance "Yarkhushta".
"Daredevils of Sasun" is an epic poem, that was transmitted entirely through oral tradition. It tells tales of the resistance of the local Armenian population to the Arab invaders during the Middle Ages, so its oral tradition is centuries upon centuries old. As this poem was very well known in many regions of Armenia, it is part of what gave the residents of these highlands such a reputation as fierce warriors quick to resist injustice and oppression. As their customs detailed above and their revolts against Ottoman rule proved, this reputation was certainly deserved to the bitter end of their existence.
"Yarkhushta", for its part, is a local martial dance. I will leave a link where you can check it out below, but it is essentially a representation of the clash between two armies. Two opposing groups of armed men, consisting of equally sized teams where each opponent would be paired up with one other, would approach each other while clapping and singing. Then, they would strike their hands together extremely hard, then withdraw and repeat the process until one side deemed that it had "won". Often, this was repeated until some of the participant's hands had been injured. Given the etymology of this word, which is something like "Friend of the weapon", it seems likely that at some point this dance was a military training exercise and was perhaps performed with real weapons.
Click
here to see a performance of Yarkhushta by the Karin ensemble.