Ep. 5 — The Homeland: Elbrus, the Golden Rivers, and the Land That Was Lost

The Greeks called it the land of the Golden Fleece, and they were not being poetic. Villagers really did sink sheepskins into mountain streams to catch the gold dust carried down from the peaks. In this episode we travel the Circassian homeland itself: a mountain chain running thirteen hundred kilometres from the Caspian to the Black Sea, forty one peaks above four thousand metres, Elbrus standing at 5,633, hundreds of rivers, mineral springs, and soil worked since the eighth millennium before Christ. Then comes the hard arithmetic. Circassia once covered roughly 250,000 square kilometres. After 1864 what remained to the Circassians was about 42,000, barely twelve percent of the original homeland. This is the land itself, and the story of how most of it was taken.Support the show