A good rule of thumb for the Caucasus is: “If you think you know what’s going on, just wait a minute.” Then sit down and read recent releases by Thomas de Waal and Oliver Bullough: they provide ...

An international research team, coordinated by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) and the Eurasia Department of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Berlin, is ...

Ariel Cohen brings firsthand knowledge of the former Soviet Union and the Middle East through a wide range of studies, covering issues such as economic development and political reform in the former ...

The Boston Marathon bombing this month sent people scrambling for maps and encyclopedias after it was revealed that the suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were ethnic Chechens with ties to ...

The title of this book comes from Aleksandr Pushkin's poetic evocation of the Caucasus as the outsider's romantic dream of freedom. King uses this as the main thread for his account of the region's ...

While visiting Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge towards the end of the second Chechen War (1999-2009), what struck me most was the large number of Christian graves that resembled Muslim tombstones. I was also ...

In a cemetery beside a mosque on the outskirts of Nazran, a small city in the republic of Ingushetia at the foot of the Caucasus mountains, stand 192 unusual headstones. Only a name and date of birth ...

If you think your country’s quarantine measures are strict, come to the North Ossetian village of Dargavs. In plague times, locals would have to move into the local necropolis… often for good. North ...

In the Bronze Age, the Caucasus Mountains region was a cultural and genetic contact zone. Here, cultures that originated in Mesopotamia interacted with local hunter-gatherers, Anatolian farmers, and ...