Kars has experienced major population shifts throughout its history, due to occupations, wars and destructions, as well as its location on the route between Anatolia and the Caucasus.
The first census was carried out under the Ottomans in 1831: it found that the city had 19,741 male inhabitants. According to the 1876 census, 25,230 men lived in Kars, of which four-fifths were Muslim. Including women, children and others that weren’t counted, it is estimated that the population was over 100,000 at the time. The census of 1877/1878 shows the population of Kars as 120,000.
In the 19th century, the expansionist policies of the Russians after their capture of the city resulted in major migration.The Tsarist regime transported some of the population of the Crimea and Caucasus to the Kars region, while others were moved inside Anatolia.
According to the census carried out in1897, after 20 years of Russian sovereignty, the population of Kars was 292,478, of whom 162.723 were men. The main reason for this huge increase in population in 20 years was Russian colonization. The ethnic structure of the city and its environs confirms this. Non-Muslims such as Armenians, Greeks, Yezidis, Assyrians and Syriacs, Germans (Nemis) and Estonians like Molokans, Doukhobors and Khakhols were located in and around Kars during this period.
With the end of Russian occupation in 1918, many ethnic and religious groups left Kars, which like other parts of Turkey faced a serious loss of population due to migration for economic, social and political reasons.
The population of Kars province increased consistently between 1927 and 1975. After 1985, when the census recorded a population of 722,431, the population shifted to a downward trend. In 1992 Ardahan and Igdir, two of the major towns of Kars province, were made into provinces in their own right, causing the population of
Kars province to fall to 325,016 in the census of 2000.
The patterns recorded since the 1980s shows that Kars loses its population to other cities while still attracting migrants from villages. The statistics confirm this trend: in 1975, 93 percent of the population of Kars was born there, while by 2000 this had fallen to 86 percent. The average number of people per household fell to 6 in 2000 from 7.5 in 1955. About 44 percent of the province’s inhabitants live in towns or cities, and the population density is 32 people per square kilometre.
While it may be less diverse in ethnic terms than in the era of Russian occupation, Kars still contains Kurds, Azerbaijanis, Turkmens, Yerlis and Terekemes (Karapapaks). If wars and occupations where the driving force behind population change in the pre-Republic period, in the past eight decades it has mostly been due to employment opportunities and the region’s detachment from central government. The population index of the city is quite below the average in the country.
