[ariel]

Tirry was wrong attributing Laz Bicagi to N.Africa, no doubt.

But we still do not know whence the inspiration for this weapon came.
Tirry based his attribution mainly on two factors: straighten the blade and you will see Algerian Flissa with the needle-point tip and the part of the blade adhering to the handle being virtually identical between the two.
In other words, it is easy to imagine that Lazes serving in North Africa ( and there are evidences that they did) just double-bent the Flissa and got their yataghan-like national weapon. Not for nothing another local name for it is Yataghan Karadeniz, the Black Sea Yataghan.

So Tirri, who was not a dummy, might have had something right about the
“ primeval” Laz Bicagi.
Quite some years ago I visited Askeri Muze and saw several of these strange creations. I asked to speak with the curator, and a young woman named Gozde Yasar casually told me their name and the locality. She was surprised that foreigners never asked these questions. I posted it here and within literally several days Turkish and Greek Forumites posted old photographs from the Trabzon area. That’s how it all started:-) But Tirry’s analysis was never disproved. So, snarky remarks about him are inappropriate. Certain things are more complex than we think and quite stubborn.