Sotk gold mine
gold mine on the border of Azerbaijan and Armenia
The Sotk gold mine (Armenian: Սոթքի ոսկու հանքավայր, romanized: Sot’k’i vosku hank’avayr), known in Azerbaijan as the Zod gold mine (Azerbaijani: Zod qızıl yatağı), is the largest mine in Armenia and Azerbaijan in terms of pure gold reserves. It is located in the vicinity of the Sotk village in the Vardenis region of Armenia's Gegharkunik Province, and the adjacent part of the Kalbajar District of Azerbaijan. According to Armenian officials, the gold mine is split roughly in half between the two countries, while according to Azerbaijani officials, 74 percent of the mine lies on Azerbaijani territory.
History
Establishment and operation
The mine was discovered in 1951 and has been in operation since 1976 In 1993, during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, the Kalbajar District of Azerbaijan (including the Azerbaijani part of the mine) passed under full control of Armenia and remained so until November 2020. In 2007, Armenia unilaterally granted the Russian company GeoProMining the right to exploit the mine. 320,500 tons of gold ore were mined in 2009, 490,000 tons in 2010, 880,000 tons in 2011. Between 350 and 400 workers were employed at the mine. The ore has been processed at the Ararat Gold Extraction Plant, where it is transported by rail. Pure gold reserves at the mine are estimated at more than 120 tons. The minimum profitable content of precious metal in the ore is equal to 0.8 g per ton.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1133665. Authority coordinates are 40.234, 45.972. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1951, 1976, 1993 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sotk gold mine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.