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The Caucasus
A mountain isthmus where Europe and Asia refuse to settle the line
Between the Black Sea and the Caspian a wall of mountains rises for a thousand kilometers and settles nothing. Cartographers have used the crest of the Greater Caucasus as the boundary between Europe and Asia since the eighteenth century, which leaves Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan European and Asian at once, depending on the atlas: all three compete in UEFA and Eurovision and belong to the Council of Europe, while the United Nations files them under Western Asia. The region splits again into the North Caucasus, Russian territory that takes in Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia, and the South Caucasus, or Transcaucasia, of the three independent republics. Leaving out either half falsifies the place.
The Greater Caucasus runs northwest to southeast from the Taman Peninsula to Baku, higher than the Alps along much of its length and topped by Mount Elbrus, a dormant volcano of 5,642 meters that is, by the conventional boundary, the highest mountain in Europe. South of it lie the valleys of the Kura and the Rioni, and beyond them the Lesser Caucasus and the Armenian Highlands, where Mount Ararat, the emblem of Armenia, visible from Yerevan and standing inside Turkey, reaches 5,137 meters. The mountains trap Black Sea moisture, so western Georgia is subtropical and green while eastern Azerbaijan runs to semi-desert. Caspian oil and gas make Baku one of the oldest petroleum cities on earth.
Few places pack in more languages: around forty are spoken across the isthmus, from Georgian and Armenian, each with an ancient alphabet of its own, to the Northeast Caucasian tongues of Dagestan, several confined to a single valley. Armenia and Georgia adopted Christianity in the fourth century and remain among the oldest Christian nations; Azerbaijan is Turkic-speaking and mostly Shia Muslim. Persian, Ottoman, and Russian empires fought over the crossing for centuries, and the Soviet collapse left a set of unresolved wars behind it — Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and above all Nagorno-Karabakh, retaken by Azerbaijan in 2023 after three decades of Armenian control and the flight of its population. Pipelines carrying Caspian energy west thread the same narrow corridor.