Caucasus: In the Wake of warriorse of Civilisation by Griffin, Nicholas - 2001

London: Headline Review, 2001 The Caucasus is a jagged land. With Turkey to the west, Iran to the south and Russia to the north, the Caucasus is trapped between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. If it didn't already possess the highest mountain range in Europe, the political pressure exerted from all sides would have forced the land to crack and rise. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Peter the Great, Hitler and Stalin all claimed to have conquered the region, leaving it a rich but bloody history. its place in legend is equally high profile: Noah's Ark is said to lie 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 tortured on the peak of a mountain in Georgia. Now, the award-winning writer 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. While tracing the history of Caucasian bloodshed, the author find himself present at the beginning of another Russian attempt to control the region. This enthralling, fiercely beautiful and intermittently hilarious book lifts the lid on a little known but crucially important area of the world whose future today, as ever, hangs in the balance. 240 p. illus, map, bibliography, index.. Hardcover. New/New.