derbend

plural derbends

1. A Turkish outpost at a remote location, typically a mountain pass, manned by guards or villagers who receive tax relief for maintaining the location and protecting it from outlaws.

   Besides the use of derbends to control mountain passes, the state sometimes engaged in the wholesale removal of troublesome mountain villages, forcibly resettling them in the valleys.

   2011, Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, →ISBN, page 46

   3 more examples

   Which reminds me to say, what I ought to have told you earlier, that the derbends which I so often mention, are stations of police guards, appointed to defend uninhabited parts of the public roads from robbers.

   1834, Eli Smith, Harrison Gray Otis Dwight, Josiah Conder, Missionary Researches in Armenia, page 40

   Possibly the original village was a derbend settlement (charged with the maintenance and protection of roads, passes, and bridges) and thus enjoyed a special status as a tax-exempt village.

   1976, Kemal H. Karpat, The Gecekondu: Rural Migration and Urbanization, →ISBN, page 72

   In the morning the rare luxury of a turkish bath relieved them of some of their soreness as well as the dirt and the fleas they had acquired, and with fresh horses and clear sunny weather, which at this altitude was cheering rather than oppressive, they rode for a few hours, stopping briefly at a derbend, a kind of halfway house, to devour a stuffed lamb the tartar had bought en route.

   1992, Margaret R. Leavy, Looking for the Armenians, page 217

1. alternativeAlternative form of Derbent.