Dimensions
129 x 198 x 18mm
The Caucasus is a jagged land. With Turkey to the west, Iran to the south and Russia to the north, and trapped between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, if the Caucasus didn't already possess the highest mountain range in Europe, the massive political pressure exerted from all sides would have forced the land to crack and rise anyway.
Conquered in its time by Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Peter the Great, Hitler and Stalin, the region's history is eventful to say the least. And its place in legend is equally high profile: Noah's Ark lies, apparently, on the borders of Armenia; the Garden of Eden can be found in the south of Azerbaijan; and Prometheus was, for his sins, bound and pecked on the peak of a mountain in Georgia.
Nicholas Griffin combines narrative history with travelogue as he explores the Caucasus in search of the legacy of Imam Shamil, nineteenth-century freedom fighter and guru of today's Chechen resistance. This enthralling, fiercely beautiful and intermittently hilarious book allows us to enter a little known but crucially important area of the world whose future today, as ever, hangs in the balance.
