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Caucasus Mountains
The high range between the Black and Caspian seas, home to Europe's tallest peak
Strung for more than 1,200 kilometres between the Black and Caspian seas, the Caucasus is a wall of high country dividing two continents and dozens of peoples and languages. Its Greater Caucasus crest carries Mount Elbrus, a twin-coned dormant volcano that is, by the common reckoning, the highest mountain in Europe. Steep, glaciated, and culturally kaleidoscopic, the region has long been a crossroads and a frontier, where Russia meets the lands of the South Caucasus.
The range rose from the collision of the Arabian plate with Eurasia, the same tectonic squeeze that built much of the mountain belt across the Middle East. The Greater Caucasus, the higher northern chain, tops out at Elbrus at about 5,642 metres, well above the Alps, with a parallel Lesser Caucasus runs to the south. Deep gorges, fast rivers, and extensive glaciers mark the high country, while the slopes drop to subtropical coasts on the Black Sea and arid plains toward the Caspian.
The Caucasus is famous for its extraordinary diversity, a mosaic of ethnic groups and tongues that ancient writers already remarked upon, and a borderland fought over by Persian, Ottoman, and Russian empires. Greek myth chained Prometheus to one of its crags. Today the range straddles Russia and the nations of Georgia and Azerbaijan, with the South Caucasus a region of long-running tensions, while Elbrus and the valleys around it draw climbers and skiers from across the former Soviet world.