Benedict Allen

I’m not altogether a fan of what the writer Sara Wheeler has called the Big Willie school of expeditions. ‘To me,’ I once intoned loftily, ‘exploration is not about conquering nature or planting flags or going where no one’s gone before in order to make a mark. Rather the opposite.’ It’s more about a spirit of inquiry, I went on. If anything, the place should make its mark on you.  How then, do we want our explorers to be? The sort with steely eyes and frosted brow who silently trudges their way poleward despite the odds – though it’s never quite clear any more what they’re usefully discovering?

How to get your head around that searingly beautiful but complicated land that lies between the Caspian and Black Seas? The early Arab historian Al Masudi called the Caucasus jabal al-alsun, the mountain of tongues, and through the centuries the place has certainly seen its fair share of peoples, many of them troublesome, many of them troubled. Indeed, for somewhere you might think would be a transcontinental backwater, its outcrops, secluded valleys and expansive plains usefully separating its formidable neighbours – Russia to the north, Turkey and Iran to the south – it’s proved remarkably busy over the centuries; also persistently relevant. The turbulence of the region is rarely far from the news.