If there are ever any doubts about 54-year-old Elman Zalkhayev’s cultural lineage, he’s got the Soviet-era identity card to prove it. Proudly, he points to the line that identifies him as Avar.

“I am Avar since I opened my eyes,” declares Zalkhayev, an unemployed resident of the village of Khalatala in northern Azerbaijan, located roughly 10 kilometers from the Georgian border. “I knew that I am Avar since I started to understand the world."

In Russia’s neighboring Dagestan, the Avars rank as the largest ethnic minority, but in Azerbaijan their numbers amount to roughly the size of a large town -- some 49,800 people, according to the last census in 2009. Calling themselves “Ma’rulal,” which means “mountain people,” they live mostly in Azerbaijan’s mountainous northwestern regions of Balakan and Zaqatala, about 400 kilometers from the capital, Baku.

Unlike in Soviet times, Azerbaijani ID cards do not identify these citizens’ ethnicity. That detail today appears only on their birth certificates.

But its presence still matters for Avars.

In the past, they have sometimes been incorrectly categorized as Lezgis, another Dagestan-based people who speak a separate, northeast Caucasian language.

For centuries, Avars have had to contend with the impact of Russia as well. Under Soviet rule, “the Russian language and culture were predominant . . .” notes Zalkhayev, who formerly worked for Russia’s Federal Migration Service in Dagestan.