Georgia has a rich and woefully underappreciated culture. Its history stretches back for millennia, and its literary traditions are deep. Georgia has its own epic literature, with The Knight in the Tiger’s Skin serving as the national classic. The poet, Shota Rustaveli, was prince and treasurer at the twelfth-century court of Queen Tamar of Georgia, under whose rule Georgia reached it apogee as a major state. Considering its distinctive history, it is no surprise that Georgia has developed it own sophistical traditions of gastronomy. But despite its riches, Georgia cooking …

[Many thanks to Lusine Sargsyan for sharing Armenian recipes and for a cooking demonstration!]
As was pointed out by Martin Lewis in an earlier post, Caucasus is “a key place, one that historically linked the Black Sea and Caspian Sea basins, and, more broadly, the greater Mediterranean world with the Central Asian realm of the Silk Roads”. The complex mosaic of intertwining influences of the Mediterranean (especially, Turkish and Greek), Central Asian and Iranian cultures are nowhere better revealed than in the culinary traditions of the Caucasian peoples. In this …

In 2010, Foreign Policy magazine asked Russian opposition leader and Sochi native Boris Nemtsov why he opposed the 2014 Winter Olympics in his hometown. Nemtsov’s reply was broad ranging. He decried the displacement of 5,000 people while warning that corruption and organized crime would devour most of the construction funds showered on the city. He began his critique, however, with Sochi’s climate:
“[Putin] has found one of the only places in Russia where there is no snow in the winter. He has decided to build these ice rinks in the warmest …

Although little known today, the Circassians were once a famous people, celebrated for their military élan, physical mien, and resistance to Russian expansion. In the nineteenth century, “Circassophilia” spread from Europe to North America, where numerous writers expressed deep admiration for the mountaineers of the eastern Black Sea. Prominent physical anthropologists deemed Circassian bodies the apogee of the human form. Promoters and hucksters capitalized on the craze, marketing a number of Circassian beauty aids and even creating fake “Circassian Beauties” to exhibit in circus sideshows.
Although their mountainous homeland is noted …

The resurgence of Circassian identity in recent years faces daunting obstacles. Many Circassians believe that the long-term sustainability of their community requires a return to the northwestern Caucasus, but both the Russian state and the other peoples of the region resist such designs. Circassians are thus focusing much of their efforts on global public opinion, building a protest movement in preparation for the Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014.
Requests by Circassian exiles to return to the Caucasus began to pour into Russian consulates not long after the expulsion of the community …

While Israel serves as a gathering place for the world-wide Jewish diaspora, it too hosts smaller diasporic communities of its own. One such community is that of the Circassians. Members of this community live in two villages: Kfar-Kama in the lower Galilee (population 2,900) and Reyhaniye further north, on the border with Syria (population 1,000). The roots of this community go back to the expulsion of the Circassians by Czarist Russia from their homeland in the North Caucasus. Most of the Circassians who survived the expulsion and the massacres ended …

The Northwest Caucasus – including Russia’s internal republics of Adygea, Karachai-Cherkessia, and Kabardino-Balkaria, as well as parts of Krasnodar Krai in Russia proper – presents a veritably kaleidoscopic ethno-linguistic picture. As can be seen from this ethno-linguistic map of Karachai-Cherkessia, based on 2002 census data, Indo-European-speaking groups such as the Russians (shown in blue) and the Ossetians (in brown) coexist with Turkic-speaking peoples like the Karachais and Nogais (in two shades of green) and Turkic-speaking Greeks (in blue-green), as well as with ethnic groups who speak Northwest Caucasian languages (this …