Over time, our understanding of the Caucasus region has increased. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Enlightenment science provided maps with greater geographic accuracy.
The Caucasus region is vast and varied, much like America, but also distinct enough that you cannot easily compare them.
History
The Caucasus region, renowned for its breathtaking river gorges, delicious food, picturesque mountaintop villages, and legendary hospitality, has long been known for its deep cultural diversity. Pliny the Younger mentioned three hundred tribes and their languages living nearby during his first-century explorations; throughout time, this land that bridged Europe and Asia has been under the control of various governments, from Tsarist Russia through Soviet Russia, Ottoman rule, as well as Roman and Tsarist rule.
Caucasus nations have always been of geopolitical significance to Russia, Turkey, and Iran; warfare often had religious overtones between native populations in the north Caucasus regions and Russian colonists during the nineteenth century.
Today, this region encompasses Georgia (including Abkhazia and South Ossetia), Armenia, and Azerbaijan as post-Soviet nation states, as well as several Russian divisions such as Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, Alania, Karachay, and Cherkessia. It boasts one of the greatest linguistic diversity worldwide, with more than 50 different languages spoken throughout this compact region!
Culture
Over the past two decades, something remarkable has taken place: war and instability from the Middle East have not translated to the Caucasus region. That doesn’t guarantee continued peace but rather indicates that it remains relatively peaceful in this part of Russia.
Pliny the Younger noted in the 1st century BCE that this region featured three hundred tribes speaking their own languages.
Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia have long had distinct cultures from Russia due to their mountainous terrain. Part of this difference stems from geography: travelling from Georgia to Chechnya requires traversing high passes that are only open seasonally.
Communities like these also possess a strong sense of identity rooted in their histories, making them generally welcoming to international visitors while sometimes appearing opinionated or even rude—an effect of Russian and Soviet periods of rule.
Languages
The Caucasus region is home to five unrelated but genetically distinct language families that span across a compact territory and have relatively low population densities, making multilingualism commonplace. South Caucasian (Kartvelian), West Caucasian, and Northeast Caucasian families appear genetically related, while those from the Northwest and North Caucasus probably aren’t.
The Kartvelian languages—Georgian, Svan, Mingrelian, and Laz—are spoken primarily in the southern mountainous regions of the Caucasus and northeastern Turkey and are often treated as dialects of one single language.
Caucasian languages are truly remarkable in their variety on all linguistic levels, boasting one of the largest consonant inventories in Eurasia, complex systems of verbal inflection, and providing challenges to morphological theory. Furthermore, some have strikingly simple vowel systems containing strictly monophonthongal inventory with minimal length contrast or evidentiality marking derived from Turkic sources; all this makes the Caucasus a remarkable laboratory for studying non-Indo-European languages.
Religions
The Caucasus region encompasses a diverse religious landscape. Armenia and Georgia are predominantly Orthodox Christians with separate national churches; Azerbaijan and the North Caucasus follow Sunnism, while Dagestan practises Shiism.
Clans and nations from different parts of Chechnya have clashed throughout its history over territorial disputes. Hostilities over Nagorno-Karabakh continue to this day, and the 1990s witnessed brutal wars between militants occupying Chechnya and Russian forces who invaded it.
Religion plays an integral role in these disputes. Early Christianization of the South Caucasus saw competing claims made about creed, apostolic roots, and autocephaly; Armenian hagiography claimed St. Nino as its founder, while Albania asserted it came first from Thaddeus and Bartholomew as apostles.
This exhibit draws upon the work of scholars across multiple fields (Linguistics, History, Politics, anthropology, and sociology, as well as literature, music, and art) to revisit and analyse the Caucasus region throughout its history, assess its current condition, and encourage further investigation of this fascinating and complex area. CEERES will host lectures to further enhance this event, focusing on this region of great humanistic, sociological, and strategic significance.
Economy
The Greater and Lesser Caucasus mountain ranges create stunning natural landscapes that have long been popular among travellers. Both ranges are biodiversity hotspots with grasslands and permanently snowcapped crags, mixed coniferous-deciduous forests, and shrubby plateaus at lower altitudes a that have attracted travellersfor millennia.
Since 2008’s financial crisis, Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia have relied heavily on oil and gas exports for their economic survival. While economies in these three former Soviet republics have slowly rebounded since then, recovery has been hindered by sanctions over Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine as well as a decline in global oil prices.
Transcaucasia boasts abundant natural resources, with the Greater Caucasus home to abundant coal and metallic ore deposits as well as oil wealth from Black Sea and Caspian Sea deposits. Although many countries were slow to implement reforms and were plagued by corruption prior to the recession, international donors are helping these nations change course and improve reform implementation; IMF support provides the chance for this. Restructuring its economy by decreasing dependence on fossil fuels while encouraging sustainable development will require changing state roles by creating an enabling business-friendly environment while simultaneously providing essential public services and investing in infrastructure development projects.