Common Sense and Whiskey

Recommended Reading: Where the West Ends

Fun new book from Michael J. Totten. Fun, that is, if your idea of thrills is a drive from Turkey into Iraq for lunch.

Where the West Ends expands on Mr. Totten's Dispatches blog for World Affairs Journal. There are sections roughly grouped as the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Black Sea.

Many authors seem to believe they won't be taken seriously unless their work is laden with ponderous history. When well written, like in some of my suggestions below, that's  worthwhile. When it's not, it's the reason tons of books are returned to the shelf half-finished.

In Where the West Ends, Mr. Totten mostly allows a cursory sketch of the past to suffice. I suspect that satisfies armchair travelers. Then he gets on with the travel writing I like best, what it feels like to get up from that chair and actually go to a place, and what it's like, personally, to be there.

Should Mr. Totten's book pique your interest, here are some suggestions for deeper reading:

- Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War by Thomas de Waal
- Azerbaijan Diary by Thomas Goltz
- Georgia Diary by Thomas Goltz
- Towers of Stone: The Battle of Wills in Chechnya by Wojciech Jagielski
- Bread and Ashes: A Walk Through the Mountains of Georgia by Tony Anderson
- Rebel Land: Unravelling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town by Christopher de Bellaigue
- In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran by Christopher de Bellaigue
- Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup by Christopher de Bellaigue
- Black Sea by Neil Ascherson
- The Black Sea: A History by Charles King

Along the Georgia Military Highway, Republic of Georgia

And here, in five installments, are excerpts from Common Sense and Whiskey, the book,  about our trip through the southern Caucasus:

1: Getting to Armenia
2: Yerevan to Tbilisi
3: Tbilisi and the Georgian Military Highway
4: The High Caucasus & the Russian Border
5: Baku

Order the entire book for $9.99 at Amazon.com, at BN.com, or the Kindle version (just $4.99).

See many more photos of the South Caucasus in the Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan Galleries at EarthPhotos.com.

 

Sir, New Mexico, Old Mexico, It Doesn't Matter

Those of us in Georgia were all considered impossible southern rubes when, the story goes, New Mexico resident Wade Miller tried to order tickets to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta was refused. It seems he gave his address as New Mexico and the Atlanta phone attendant refused to sell the tickets on the grounds that he or she could only sell domestically, and not to Mexicans.

So it's a little redemptive to read that

"London Olympic organizers mistakenly displayed the South Korean flag on a jumbo screen instead of North Korea's before a women's soccer match Wednesday, prompting the North Koreans to refuse to take the field for nearly an hour."

and then, there's this.

Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book - The Southern Caucasus, Chapter Fifteen

Here is Chapter Fifteen of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book, a very short trip through Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Track down previous chapters here. Click the photos to make them bigger. More photos and additional commentary are available at A Common Sense and Whiskey Companion. And here's the Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia Galleries at EarthPhotos.com. Order the entire book for $9.99 at Amazon.com, at BN.com, or the Kindle version (just $4.99).

 

The Wien Flughafen stood disturbingly deserted at night, all the shops stocked like Christmas, but you couldn’t play with the toys. They glittered and blinked coquettishly behind glass doors pulled shut.

Our old buddy Austrian Airlines left Vienna on a beeline toward Budapest, then Timisoara, Bucharest, Constanta, over the Black Sea to Trabzon and on into Yerevan, all of it in blackness below. The flight tracking screen showed our destination tucked right in between Grozny and Baghdad: “Local time in Jerewan 4:31 a.m.”

Austrian’s corporate color scheme was brilliant red, the national color, and the cabin crew was dressed red hat to sensible (but red) shoes. Fetching, I thought.

Taxiing out (“We are number one for takeoff”), a wail arose behind us. A woman screamed “Go back, go back and check!” Crimson crew rushed to her and kneeled and huddled round our distraught Armenian. One of them came back forward and PA’d their apologies, “Dis is not Azerbaijan, ve know dis.”

The safety announcements were recorded, and they were for the wrong destination. This woman wasn’t by God going to Baku. Azerbaijan’s border with Armenia had been shut tight for fifteen years.

More Good Reads, Relevant Links

Lawrence Sheets covered the demise of the former Soviet Union for NPR. He writes his memoir in a brisk, non-academic style that's just right for the interested lay person. It's a quick read; Took me only a weekend and Monday. He includes what must be all his greatest hits, his quick trip to Afghanistan, a trip to Sakhalin Island in the Russian far east, visiting the Chernobyl exclusion zone, but I'm particularly drawn to his Caucasus reporting.

He makes my modest story on the southern Caucasus, recounted in CS&W, appear callow, and I appreciate him for it. It's exciting to get background on some of the places we visited a few years after he did, in Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia (even a tiny place we visited, Dzoroget in Armenia, athough he visited under entirely different circumstances). His coverage of Abkhazia's succession from Georgia is admittedly maybe not general interest, but I loved it.

He reported that little war along with his friend and fellow reporter Thomas Goltz, who has written his own books, and if you read their accounts alongside each other, you get a real, exciting sense of what went on at that fraying edge of the Soviet empire.

The books:

Eight Pieces of Empire by Lawrence Scott Sheets
Georgia Diary by Thomas Goltz

Similarly, you can read Sheets on Armenia alongside Christopher de Bellaigue's Rebel Land, (earlier post) which is set just across Armenia's western border in Turkey, for a richer understanding of the Armenian genocide question, and Sheets on Armenia alongside Thomas de Waal's richly reported Black Garden (that's what "Karabakh" means), which is set just across Armenia's eastern border in Azerbaijan for a better understanding of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Go ahead and polish off your expertise about the southern Caucasus with:

- Bread and Ashes by Tony Anderson. Travels in Georgia.

Also in the region, see
- Towers of Stone by Wojciech Jagielski, reporter for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza,
- The Man who Tried to Save the World by Scott Anderson, about aid worker Fred Cuny in the north Caucasus, 
- Chienne de Guerre by Anna Nivat, incredibly brave war reporting from Chechnya,
- Beslan: The Tragedy of School Number 1 by Timothy Phillips on the nightmare in North Ossetia,
- Thomas Goltz's other books Azerbaijan Diary and Chechnya Diary,
- Thomas de Waal's other book The Caucasus: An Introduction,
- and Christopher de Bellaigue's In the Rose Garden of  the Martyrs , a memoir of Iran. de Bellaigue writes beautifully, and after all, Iran borders Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh.

Finally, to stay up to date, there's the International Crisis Group's North and South Caucasus reporting. (Lawrence Sheets is ICG Project Director for the South Caucasus these days) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Caucasus section. 

 

Good Reads

Christopher de Bellaigue is a pleasure. I've really enjoyed his Rebel Land, which details his search for truth on the Turkey/Armenia question. Okay, that may not be mass appeal stuff, but I'm personally interested, and he has an entirely engaging style.

After he lived in Turkey, de Bellaigue lived in Tehran, and another of his books, In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs, is on the next-to-read list. Got to get on with it, though, because his next book comes in May. It's about the coup against Mossadegh.

But both those books have stiff competition.

Two books arrived at the farm this week: The Unconquered by Scott Wallace and Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo. The Unconquered is subtitled In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes, and it's one of these stories of adventure and peril in the jungle. Katherine Boo's book is subtitled Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. There are lengthy online excerpts for both.

Have a look: Here's Scott Wallace, and here's Katherine Boo.

New Photographer Link

I've added Justyna Mielnikiewicz to the category Photographers, with Respect in the sidebar, below right. When you have a few minutes, please go see her work. Her bio says she began her career in Poland before moving to Tbilisi. Our photos of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan don't match the grit, the real, I-live-here feel of hers.

 

One Way to Make Obviously Smart People

Or at least good chess players.

Photo from a shop window in Yerevan, Armenia.

What More CAN They Do?

I had occasion to hire a locksmith this week, and as he went about his work he observed that this would be quite an election, this next presidential one. I agreed that was surely true. He said about the President's birth certificate, "Now if they can just prove it's true...."

I was confounded by that. I suggested (perhaps lamely) that if it IS true, what more can they do!?

The energy we expend to prevent reconciliation. Of course, it's not just here in America.

In my book Common Sense and Whiskey, I write about our trip through Tibet:

Just before Xegar stood an imbecilic checkpoint where we waited on the side of the road in the LandCruiser while the local three we’d accrued scampered off into a little squat building that sat, I mean, in the middle of absolutely slap-me-blind nowhere.

Now, man may do worse things to man than to restrict movement in a place so utterly barren, vast and empty, but hardly anything more stupid. So many rules in a place so empty.

That's Tibetans versus Han Chinese.

The Tibetans in exile have just elected a new Prime Minister who has never been to Tibet in an effort by the Dalai Lama to preempt Chinese control of succession after his death. Meanwhile the Chinese insist on vetting the next Dalai Lama.

•••••

As we stood in Armenia near at the Turkish/Armenian border, our guide Levon pointed out

A really big statue on a hill, Georg somebody, Armenian partisan, (who) stands and taunts the Turks still.

That's Armenians versus Turks.

This week Turkey has begun to tear down a Turkish/Armenian friendship statue in the eastern city of Kars, formerly home to a large Armenian population (and the setting for Orhan Pamuk's book Snow). American presidents try to reassure the Armenian diaspora on an 24 April anniversary important to Armenians. This week, President Obama appears to have pleased no one. The Armenians stand, and feel, alone, save for a dubious partner in Russia.

•••••

The Tibetans have clearly and obviously come under come under the Chinese iron hand. The killing of Armenians by Turks (whom I dearly love, and I will argue anywhere that Istanbul is one of the top five cities on the planet) is well established.

If it IS true, what more can they do?

- Photo of the Potala, Lhasa, Tibet from EarthPhotos.com.

Where to Go, Why, and What to Read.

Travel ferociously. Get out there. Engage people. Witness events. Explore the world. Bust a move. See all you can see. But when you’re at home and calm, sanguine and reflective, back in the part of the house where people don’t come unless you invite them, in that one little spot where only you rule, that’s where you can see most clearly.

Back there in that room, I saw our trip to Sarajevo as a conceit. We decided we’d go and see the aftermath of war and then we would think about it. And we saw the burned out houses on the airport road. We saw children at play beneath a hand-painted sign warning of “snijper” fire over there, in that direction.

We stood on a hill above town with an old woman and her little granddaughter and a vast field of Muslim graves behind them. We took pictures of SFOR soldiers (NATO’s ‘Stabilization Force’) taking pictures. And in the end, we didn’t really understand it any better. Or at least, we didn’t Glean Wisdom.

I read and read, before and after Sarajevo, and we went to see it, and we had a view of the bombed out parliament building from the Holiday Inn hotel, where we paid in advance, in cash, in Deutschmarks, right up front, for our entire stay.

The parliament building from the Holiday Inn, Sarajevo.

The elevator opened to carpet ripped by gunfire.

The main reconstruction work in Sarajevo was in busting down curbs and rebuilding them with wheelchair ramps.

We walked up and down the open air Markale market where a random, direct shelling killed 68, wounded two hundred on a rainy Saturday in February, 1994 – the bloodiest attack in the then twenty-two month long conflict. We saw bricks and mortar blasted from the side of the hotel next door. People bustled about the market that day, selling flowers, buying fruit, and we took it all in, but still we didn’t Glean Wisdom.

The Southern Caucasus Part Two: Yerevan to Tbilisi

 

Yerevan streets were rife with remnants. Leftover communism wasn't Armenians' fault, but it was their reality: remnant autos, housing, and remnant attitudes.

Traffic and shops and change booths filled Mashtots Avenue, and young people stood everywhere talking on their phones as we drove around town. Men without shirts mowed the parks, forlorn. Couples, aging and young alike, sat under trees and flirted.

A month before, a new Armavia A 320 Airbus crashed on approach to the other side of the Black Sea, to the Russian resort of Sochi, killing all 113 aboard. Today, teens on cell phones congregated around the glassy Armavia building not seeming to remember.

We bought a little something from the artists market across from the philharmonic and enjoyed fine Kotayk (“Co-Tike”) beers at terrace cafes. At one, a café associated with the adjacent Palace of Culture, a former Peace Corps volunteer remarked how Armenia had grown sharply more European in his five year absence.

We took a spin around Republic Square, and watched the wedding processions. Newlyweds, preceded by a car video-taping their antics, stood through the sunroof in their limousine, as they took turns around the center of the capital. 

*****

We went to pay our bill at the travel agency and Noune, travel agent, sat us down for remarks. She kept pulling a shock of gray back into her black hair. She told us about her sons, in photos behind her. This one was in Boston! A medical student! The other? Oh, he lived in Moscow. She was dismissive. He was in television.

The Southern Caucasus, Part One: From the Eventual Book

Over a few installments, here comes the tale of our trip across the southern Caucasus. Here's part one:

The Wein Flughafen stood disturbingly deserted at night, all the shops stocked like Christmas but you couldn’t play with the toys. They glittered and blinked coquettishly behind glass doors pulled shut.

Our old buddy Austrian Airlines, the official airline of strange destinations east of Europe, left Wein on a beeline toward Budapest, Timosoara, Bucharest, Costanta, over the Black Sea to Trabazon and on into Yerevan, all of it in blackness below, the flight tracking screen cheerfully showing our destination tucked right in between Grozny and Baghdad, once showing the stark, lonely, “Local time in Jerewan 4:31 a.m.”

It was the tiniest Airbus, a little 319, five rows of business class without a soul in ‘em except us. We called it Murray class. The corporate color scheme was brilliant red, the national color, and the cabin crew was dressed red hat to sensible (but red) shoes. Fetching, I thought.

We taxied out (“We are number one for takeoff”) and a wail arose behind us. A woman was screaming “Go back, go back and check!” Crimson crew rushed to her and the cockpit continued on “Blab la bla, we’ll be airborne in one minute….” While the cabin crew kneeled and huddled round our distraught Armenian.

Sochi Olympics Watch #6

Sochi, home of the 2014 Olympic Winter Games, is in a terrific neighborhood. Sochi and Makhachkala, for example, are a little less than 400 miles apart. Makhachkala, you ask?

Yep, Makhachkala, capital of Dagestan, boiling hot, humid center of crime and thuggery on the Caspian Sea.

The Unesco World Heritage site of Derbent is down the Caspian coast from Makhachkala. But you're unlikely to want to visit anytime soon because of the general state of lawlessness that prevails in Dagestan, where "Criminal activity is widespread throughout the region, often targeting the few foreign tourists that do continue to visit for kidnapping, extortion, and worse." 

Dagestan is one of the roiling north Caucasus republics that, along with Chechnya, Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia (east to west), are giving the Russian fits. And are right next to Sochi.

Stratfor has an open access report this morning called The Caucasus Emirate. It notes that so far this year there have been double the number of killings in the region than last year at this time.

Why should this specific little slice of land throw up bands of militant Islamists? Why not Azerbaijan, which is adjacent to Dagestan, and has been predominantly Muslim forever, for example?

Wojciech Jagielski has a theory. A reporter for Gazeta Wyborcza, a mass daily in Poland, he's also the author of Towers of Stone, a terrific book about his war reporting in the Caucasus. To summarize and greatly simplify, the people of the North Caucasus allowed the godless Soviet system to replace their old, moderate Islamic way of life, and once that system collapsed, they couldn't very well return to their old ways, which they had rejected just 70-odd years before. So in effect they doubled down, and embraced the much more austere version of Islam that visitors from Arab lands brought with them.

Jeffrey Tayler visited Makhachkala, and even Derbent, for his book Murderers in Mausoleums. A quote:

We climbed out of the Volga's smoke-befouled cabin into a Bengali blaze to confront a scene reminiscent of Partition and the mass flight of refugees. Throngs of heavyset scarved women and short, swaggering men surged up the steps, dragging tawdry bundles and taped-together suitcases; following them, glancing about fearfully, were boys in skullcaps and little girls with babies lashed to their backs. Up on the platform the police checked papers... troops, clad in camouflage and wielding Kalashnikovs, loitered, stone-faced, in groups of three and four.

Any idea where he's talking about? Yep, it's the Makhachkala train station. And you can be sure, as with any Jeffrey Tayler book, it only gets worse.

Remarkably, there's a Dagestan Travel Guide on the internet. It's where the quote in the third paragraph about criminal activity, kidnapping and extortion came from. It goes on, "Dagestan shares along with the rest of the North Caucasus an extravagantly corrupt official culture and bribes and harassment are business as usual."

But if you should still wish to go, the Dagestan Travel Guide ends with this good cheer: "Visitors should know that there is no real embassy or consulate in Dagestan. Your best bet would be Moscow in Russia, Tbilisi in Georgia, Baku in Azerbaijan, or Yerevan in Armenia. Good luck!"

(Read more Sochi Olympics Watch articles here. Haven't been to the North Causacus yet, but you can see photos from the South Caucasus in the Armenia Gallery, the Azerbaijan Gallery and the Georgia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Sports: It's Not All About Golf Clubs, Cadillac SUVs and Swedish Wives.

1. Egyptians hold three of the top-four spots on the men’s professional squash circuit.

2. Armenian chess players "are treated like rock stars."

3. And add yachting to hiking on your list of things not to do near Iran.

Twenty Years Ago, Communist Collapse Continued

As a single event, the initial breach of the Berlin Wall succinctly symbolized the entire tumult of twenty years ago, so on the twentieth anniversary of the event earlier this month everyone reflected on what it meant to them, personally, and what it has meant to the wider world. But the wall's fall was just the beginning of change.

The really great compilation called The Collapse of Communism, as written at the time by the correspondents of the New York Times, captures the sense of wonder with which we all watched the daily events, from Lithuania in the northwest of the increasingly tenuous Soviet empire all the way down to the Caspian Sea, where pogroms against Armenians had already begun in Baku, Ajerbaijan by this time twenty years ago.

Just today twenty years ago, 24 November, 1989, the Czechoslovakian Communist Party leadership resigned and, from a NYT article on 25 November by Steven Greenhouse, some

"350,000 protesters crowded into central Prague in the eighth straight day of huge demonstrations.

"In a striking paradox, the throng was addressed by Alexander Dubcek, whose liberal regime was overthrown by a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968.... It was Mr. Dubcek's first public appearance in Prague since 1968."

Ominously  (since we all watched the brutal Christmas Day demise of the Ceausescus), further to the southeast in Romania, old Nicolae and Elena just didn't get the whole change thing. From Alan Riding, writing in the NYT twenty years ago today:

"In a huge display of government control, tens of thousands of workers were marched to a demonstration here today to celebrate the re-election of President Nicolae Ceausescu as General Secretary of the Communist Party."

Read the entire article, In Rumania, the Old Order Won't Budge.

(Photos: Top, "Red Square" sign from the Russia Gallery, and bottom, the Ceausescus' Palace in Bucharest, Romania, from the Romania Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

More Football Diplomacy

For its combination of sheer cultural eclecticism and pure physical appeal, Istanbul has to be one of the top five cities on earth.* If you've spent enough time there to become a fan, you'll doubtless have become a fan of Turks, surely some of the nicest people anywhere.

Turkey is never long without troubles or controversies. September saw record flooding in Istanbul. The country's biggest media tycoon, who is not a favorite of the Prime Minister, was assessed "a staggering 3.75 billion lira ($2.5 billion) fine for allegedly evading taxes." To make domestic political hay, Prime Minister Erdogan  (a former mayor of Istanbul) has had a running battle with Israel since the Davos meetings in January, and just this week Turkey stopped Israel from participating in a NATO war exercise in a dispute over Gaza.

But despite the usual calumnies and controversies, the Turks are in the midst of doing something good. They're playing football. Today "Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan arrived in the western Turkish city of Bursa Wednesday to attend a Turkey-Armenia World Cup qualifier as part of the two countries' move to normalize ties after nearly a century of rift," according to the AP. 

This brings to mind a fine photo of Turkish football fans being protected by Armenian troops in Yerevan a year ago. It was great photographic work from Onnik Krikorian/Oneworld Multimedia 2008. we posted it here at the time (and will use this excuse to post again).

The occasion for the photo? Turkish President Abdullah Gul was in the house on 6 September, 2008 in Yerevan's Republican stadium for a World Cup qualifying soccer match. 

There will be trials, and there are many on both sides who oppose reopening the Turkish/Armenian border that Turkey closed in 1993 in solidarity with Azerbaijan during the conflicts that engulfed the former Soviet Union after its collapse.

But as we've said, open borders is good. And anything that will facilitate freer movement of people and commerce to and through Armenia is bound to improve the lot of its people.

(See extensive photo coverage of the region in the Turkey Gallery, Armenia Gallery, Azerbaijan Gallery and Georgia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. Top photo from EarthPhotos.com.)

*I'd fill in the rest of the top five with Hong Kong, Paris, Sydney and leave the fifth open for debate - your results may vary.

Maximizing Your International Travel Dollar

Our mailbox is laden with expensive glossy catalogs from high end travel providers. Mountain Travel Sobek, “Celebrating 40 Years of Adventure Travel,” sends a very nicely done 204 page 2009 catalog offering, for a couple of examples:

12 days in Namibia for $7795 per person, starting and ending in Windhoek, including internal airfare and the company of others (price offered is for four or five people). Including Clara and Herb from Cleveland, your close proximity partners for nearly two weeks of Land Rover trips and box lunches, whom you’ll meet on arrival, this epic journey departs from Windhoek twice each year, on Mountain Travel Sobek’s schedule.

Or how about 13 nights in the Republic of Georgia from $3695 (again, not just you, but from 4 – 12 people)? This one starts in Tibilisi, twice a year, again on Mountain Travel Sobek’s schedule.

Not to fault Mountain Travel Sobek. This is what they do. You’ve seen the Perillo Tours ads for travel to Italy? Same thing. You’re buying it? They’re selling it.

So don’t buy it. Do your research and hire local people. They not only have local knowledge, but they’re also often quoting in local money, and the money you spend with them stays local.

My wife Mirja and I flew into Windhoek, for example, by ourselves, and spent a bare fraction of that group price. And it was simple:

“We take care of each other; we can not expect the government to”

Armenia's Central Bank allowed its currency, the dram, to float against the dollar this week, causing an immediate twenty per cent drop in its value and a wave of panic buying.

Armenians weren't exactly prospering to begin with. In 2006, we visited with our travel agent in her Yerevan office. Noune was new at her job. Only some months.

She had been a violinist but resigned herself to the need to get paid. She complained, “Our only pension is ten, fifteen dollars a month. Electricity is expensive, sometimes more than one hundred, but some people make less than one hundred.”

“In the U.S. I know, you can make five thousand, ten thousand dollars in a month, it is depending on what you do, but here? Maybe two hundred.”

Football Diplomacy

Photo from Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2008

Turkish football fans, protected by Armenian troops in Yerevan, 6 September, 2009.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul was in the house on 6 September in Yerevan Armenia's Republican stadium for a World Cup qualifying soccer match. It was the first ever visit to Armenia for a Turkish leader. The Caucasian Knot has lots of photo coverage.

Following the Soviet collapse, in 1993 Ankara closed the Turkish land border with Armenia in a show of solidarity with Azerbaijan, to Armenia's east, which was fighting Armenian-backed separatists over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. The border remains closed today.

Politics is complicated in the Caucasus. Armenia's eastern neighbor, Azerbaijan, supplies Caspian Sea oil via pipeline through Georgia to Ceyhan, Turkey, for shipment, bypassing Russia, to the west. Georgia meanwhile, shares borders with Turkey to its west, and Russia to its north (as we all now know) along the spine of the Caucasus Mountains.

Mt. Kazbeg, on the Georgia/Russia border, is taller than all the Alps at 5047 meters, versus Mt. Blanc's 4810. Scarcely 70 miles northeast is Chechnya's capital, Grozny. And notably after the August war, Sochi, site of the 2012 winter Olympic Games, is scarcely 25 miles north along the Black Sea beyond the disputed Abkhazia region of Georgia.

Oh - and Christian Armenia borders, to its south, Islamic Iran. In June 2006, we drove down to the Khor Virap Monastery (near the Armenia/Iran border), which sits in the shadow of Mt. Ararat, in Turkey. We have extensive photo coverage of Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey on EarthPhotos.com.