THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Dagestan itself is almost uniquely suited to creating a fractured society.  Bleak and raw, its deep valleys plunge hundreds of metres from a high treeless plateau.  The rocks of the mountains break out of the valley sides, sometimes squeezing together to make narrow gulleys, sometimes rearing up to make crags.  The freebooting societies that lived in these inaccessible, tawny valleys needed protection from each other, and used the crags as natural castles on which to build villages.  To travellers along the valley bottoms, the villages are visible on the top of the slopes above, natural fortresses for some of the most warlike people in the world.  And the valleys created and ethnic mosaic also.  Dagestan is home to dozens of languages, as many as forty, and the ethnic groups often live in isolated villages surrounded entirely by other nations. It is a bewildering place.

Bullough/Caucasus