REVIEW BY NICK EVANS
Abdudzhalil Abdudzhalilov called himself the ‘last of the Mohicans’. Until his death in 2015, he was the last inhabitant of the village of Gamsutl in Dagestan, in the south of the Russian Federation. A spectacular image of the deserted village, high in the mountains, features on the cover of Christoph Baumer’s second volume of his sweeping History of the Caucasus. It is a fitting choice. As Baumer emphasised in the first book, this is a history of the whole region: it includes the north of the Great Caucasus Mountain Range, now within Russia, and not just the modern republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.
The image is also fitting as it simultaneously illustrates the drama of the Caucasus’s landscapes, and the effects of recent history. A later picture of Gamsutl in snow and winter fog illustrates the challenges faced by the Russian army as it tried to crush resistance to the incorporation of the North Caucasus into the Russian Empire in the mid-19th century. Elsewhere in the book, photographs show the Wehrmacht crossing the passes of the north-west Caucasus in 1942. Baumer shows that the current configuration of the Caucasus is not predetermined by its landscapes: it was the economic dislocations brought about by the end of the Soviet Union that spelled the end for Abdudzhalilov’s village.
This is very much a political history of the Caucasus. Volume 2 begins with an account of the Georgian ‘Golden Age’ under Bagrationi rule in the 11th and 12th centuries. Baumer sets out the contexts of Byzantine, Seljuk, Fatimid, and Crusader politics with concision and clarity. The text gives less sense of the cultural efflorescence of the period: Baumer refers dismissively to the ‘sycophants’ at the court of Queen Tamar (c.1160-1213), who had to compensate for her lack of ‘military virtues’. Shota Rustaveli’s epic poem dedicated to her, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, a masterpiece of medieval literature, does not get a mention. However, the fine pictures of churches and monasteries, coins, manuscripts, and modern monuments bring to life the period itself, and its modern political resonances.
Excavating the archives… from Fife to Moray