Exploring Russia’s forgotten land: The North Caucasus
I certainly wasn’t in Moscow anymore. Looking through the window of a gondola lift, swaying high above a mountain gorge, the view was nothing but snow-gauzed peaks all around. It’s a half-hour, multistage trip to the summit of this towering mountain, and they say it’s important to focus the mind while getting accustomed to the thinning air, so I amuse myself by wondering, as if I forgot my bearings, where on earth this might be.
Somewhere in Switzerland, perhaps? No, the jumble of tiny buildings now barely visible at the mountain’s base looks distinctly un-European, and the spicy lyulya kebab I had at lunch says it’s likely a place in Asia. Maybe the Himalayas?
But in a small wooden cafe at the freezing, desiccated summit, a babushka in a woolen headscarf pours a few fingers of zavarka – thick black tea concentrate – into a glass and tops it off with boiling water from a samovar. In gentle Russian she advises me to sit, drink the tea, and breathe deeply until I find my feet. Clearly, I am still in Russia, where I have lived for more than 30 years.
In fact, I am in Russia’s North Caucasus Federal District, a place of soaring snow-capped mountains, vertiginous gorges, cascading waterfalls, and gushing thermal mineral springs, all set amid some of Europe’s last untouched alpine wilderness. Lying between the Caspian and Black seas on Russia’s southern fringe, it is a surprisingly beautiful, ethnically fragmented, and culturally diverse land that remains largely unknown to the outside world. Larger than France, the North Caucasus Federal District is located on a historic fault line of civilizations. Its rocky hillsides are littered with ancient fortresses, buried cities, and eerie village-like necropolises. And then there’s Mount Elbrus, Europe’s highest peak, where I am sipping tea.
Today most of this territory is divided into seven ethnic republics that identify with different religious traditions, mainly Muslim, but there are also indigenous Christians, Jews,
Chapter 1: Do millennials like mud baths?Chapter 2: Fluffy powder and fluffy hatsChapter 3: Rooftop of EuropeChapter 4: Monasteries and many tonguesChapter 5: Military tourism, anyone?Chapter 6: Shedding an image of dangerChapter 7: If you build it, will they come?