Swiss explorer, photographer and historian of Eurasia Christophe Baumer has produced the second volume of his History of the Caucasus, splendidly illustrated with his large format, color photographs of imposing castles, fortified villages, and majestic monasteries and mosques. It looks like a coffee table book, but the dense text speaks to a higher purpose.
Azerbaijan
As Azeri drones pounded Armenian defenders of Stepanakert in the September 2020 war, “Armenian and Azerbaijani politicians and historians continue to discuss whether the Nagorno-Karabagh region [was] only annexed to Albania after the division of Armenia in 387 BC”, writes Christoph Baumer in his new History of the Caucasus. In this part of the world, the past is never dead, it isn’t even past. That persistence of the past is what lends the Caucasus its fascination while it creates many challenges for its modern citizens. To dwell in the shadow of fortresses repurposed since the Bronze Age by Persians, Romans and Arabs, is both an enriching legacy and a burden.
Umm-El-Banine Assadoulaeff was born in 1905 into one of Baku’s wealthiest families: her peasant-born great-grandfather had discovered oil on his land. She left in 1923, after the Revolution, for Istanbul and then Paris, whence she never returned. Days in the Caucasus, originally published in Paris in 1945, is her memoir of those years.