Oil, war and stirring imperial ghostsINTREPID travellers have long had a penchant for visiting the Caucasus. This is a land of mountains and seas, squeezed into the borders of three old empiresPersian, Ottoman and Russian. As such it has been strategically important (and remains so, as we learned again in the short war that Russia fought against Georgia in August). And it has an enticing whiff of exoticism, associated with all the old images of fierce mountain tribesmen who spent the 19th centu....
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