Wherever we are in Abkhazia and whoever we meet, the war in ’92-’93 is always the absolute point of reference. For the inhabitants, but also for us as travellers, the war is inescapable. Two-thirds of Abkhazia’s pre-war population was driven out of the country and as a result a comparable percentage of buildings and farmland is empty. There are ruins everywhere. Strangely enough, the inhabitants do not seem to see them anymore. When we ask about them they point right through them, to indicate the magnificent magnolia or tea plantation behind them. The Abkhazian conflict cannot be comprehended without taking a brief tour of history. Geopolitically, the Caucasus can be compared to the Balkans. Just as the Balkans were a plaything for Russia, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and during the Cold Wall were on the border between West and East, the history of the Caucasus is a series of conflicts, purely and simply as a result of its position between the Russians, the Persians and the Ottomans and later the Turks. Like the Balkans, the Caucasus is a mix of Christianity and Islam. Perhaps the most important difference is the high mountains, which form an even greater wall and line of defence than the wooded hills of the Balkans. When God created the Earth and man in his image, begins one of the many creation myths in the Caucasus, he took a large sack full of languages and flew over the Earth to distribute them. England was given its language as were France, Russia, China and so on. At the end of his journey, God still had many unused languages in his sack which he didn’t know what to do with. In desperation, he quickly shook out the remainder over the Caucasus. Anyone who looks at old ethnic maps of the Caucasus will see that almost every valley has its own language. Some are related to Persian or Turkish, like Armenian and Azeri, but some, like Abkhazian and Georgian, form tiny, independent language families. In Arabic the mountains are called jabal al-alsun, the mountains of languages. Persians, Arabs, Russians, Mongolians; all these major races have tried to seize the Caucasus or use it to their advantage, but no one has ever succeeded completely. The innumerable peoples of the Caucasus did, however, lend themselves to divide and rule politics. Nowhere is that better described than in the many Russian classics about the Caucasus, such as Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat. This politico-historical but predominantly romantic tale about Imam Shamil, who in the 19th century created previously unknown political unity in the Caucasus, describes how the mountain peoples ultimately crumbled in the face of Russia’s advance and bribery tactics. Pushkin and Lermontov, Russian greats from the 19th century, also travelled through the Caucasus and described the spectacular entanglements between the Russian imperialists and the ‘noble savages’ from the Caucasus. And spectacular they were. The Caucasian War (1816-1864), which cost tens of thousands of people their life, changed the Caucasus irrevocably. During the war the anti-Russian fighters discovered Islam as a unifying and political tool. Georgia, in its turn, earned the reputation among the smaller peoples of ‘small Russia’, thanks to its voluntary alliance with Russia
Colliding histories
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