Images by Mark Read
Shot on an Olympus C-820L digital camera
Skyline near Baku
31 May
Baku, Azerbaijan
FIRST BLOOD
by Spencer Wells
Transcaucasia, the first real stop on the expedition. Over the course of the past three weeks we have collected from four populations in Georgia, one in Armenia, and two in Azerbaijan. Our sampling strategy depends a bit on luck, with advance planning guiding us as much as possible. As Pasteur noted, chance favors the prepared mind.
Our first sampling in Batumi was at a state-operated hospital, where one of our collaborators runs the clinical laboratories. This demonstrates one style of sampling - that arranged with the cooperation of the medical authorities in, typically, a large provincial town. In these circumstances, the collections are perhaps less homogeneous than they would be in an isolated mountain village, but we may gain a better general understanding of the pattern of diversity in the population as a whole. To some extent our choice of populations is determined through contacts, and the willingness of the local authorities to collaborate with us.
So, how do we decide which groups to include in the study? Linguistic classifications provide one of the best guides, although there are competing schools of thought on this. As Nat discusses below, languages change in a regular way over time, in much the same way as DNA sequences. Linguistic mutations lead to linguistic polymorphisms (auto bonnets in the UK correspond to car hoods in the USA); certain forms become common in emerging dialects, ultimately leading to the complete divergence of the two. At this stage a speaker of one speech variety can no longer understand the other, and they become two peoples separated by a no-longer-common language. In this sense, the languages reveal a hypothesis about the genetic relationships of the groups involved: speakers of closely-related languages should be closely related genetically.
Another possibility, demonstrated most clearly in our work on the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, is that languages move into regions from elsewhere, while genetic similarities are base more on geographic proximity. In the case of Central Asia, we have determined that speakers of languages which are not particularly closely related (such as Hindi and Uzbek) have a very clear genetic connection, while speakers of some closely-related languages (Altaian and Buriat) are less similar genetically. In this case geography may be a better predictor of genetic relatedness, taking into account certain physical barriers (the Altai-Sayan mountains, for instance).
Gudauri, High Caucasus
So, in our sampling schemes we try to incorporate both linguistic data and
geography in order to get the best sampling coverage in the most efficient way.
In Georgia, for instance, we sampled from groups living in the southwest
(Ajarian), northwest (Svan) and central (Q'azbegi) regions, but also made an
effort to sample from a group living very near the Q'azbegis, the Ossetians,
who speak a very different language. The Ossetians claim to be the descendants
of the Scythians (mentioned in Herodotus' Histories; see the EurAsia '98
links page for an online version), Central Asian steppe nomads who spoke an
eastern Iranian language and settled in the central Caucasus in the latter part
of the first millennium BC. Our prediction is that this population will show
genetic similarities to other eastern Iranian speakers (such as the Yaghnobi we
hope to collect in Tajikistan, later in the trip), as well as to the current
Turkic-speaking inhabitants of Central Asia. This linguistic sampling also
guided our efforts to sample from the Lezgis, speakers of a divergent North
Caucasian language in northern Azerbaijan, 15 km from the border with
Dagestan.
Collecting near South Ossetia |
 Preparing DNA, Yerevan |
MOUNTAIN OF LANGUAGES
by Nat Pearson
'Gmadlobt,' Mark told the clerk while buying a Coke. The red-headed foreigner knew he'd nailed the pronunciation when the woman leaned briefly from the dark kiosk to beam with surprise. Strange thing is, the mouthful of consonants used to thank a Tbilisian is pretty tame by Georgian standards. Next time you fly to Mtskheta, for example, remember your sabuti twitmprinavshi chasajdomad (boarding pass)...
The Real Thing, Georgia
Crossing the Caucasus, we've found ourselves in a linguistic whirlwind. Phrasebooks litter the floorboards, our ears marvel at a crazy swirl of voices and our eyes at unfamiliar scripts like strange codes from a dream. To communicate we rely heavily on multilingual hosts and, absent them, wits and improvised signing. Beyond gmadlobt, we've learned to thank with teshekkür, shnorakalutsun, spasiba and chokh saur. This small region, long-dubbed the mountain of languages, hosts remarkable linguistic diversity, with interesting implications for anthropological genetics. The diversification of language we see evidence of here both causes and reflects genetic isolation of speakers. Poor communication inhibits breeding, for example, while barriers of topography and distance which isolate populations genetically can also, by reducing linguistic interaction, let speech varieties diverge by their own complex processes of change. All this suggests genetic diversity may be particularly interesting in regions, like the Caucasus, where linguistic diversity is great.
For perspective, note that across the route covered in our first web post, the
main local languages we encountered -- English, French, Italian, Albanian,
Greek and Vlach -- all likely descend from a single language spoken several
thousand years ago over an area of western Eurasia, though exactly where
remains controversial. Linguists have dubbed that ancestral language
Proto-Indo-European (recognizing the familial links of a geographically broad
group of modern languages called Indo-European) and have inferred much of its
vocabulary and structure based on known processes of language change. The
kinship of Indo-European languages -- noticeable to varying degrees depending
on which languages you compare -- gives significance to a fact noted last week,
that the Hittite word for water was similar to the English one.
The next week we entered the territory of another major language family -- one
that has also expanded, more recently than Indo-European, across a vast swath
of Eurasia. The Turkic languages, including Azeri and Turkish, likely
originated in an ancestral language spoken northeast of the Proto-Indo-European
homeland; Turkic speakers likely spread west only a couple thousand years ago.
Azeri and Turkish, mutually very similar, offer few familiar footholds (save
some Farsi and French borrowings) to Indo-European speakers, and show an
unusual feature called vowel harmony, whereby a word's vowels must under
certain conditions match in one or more distinguishing characteristics. In
this case vowels are classified in speakers' minds -- not consciously -- as
either 'front' or 'back' (indicating tongue position), and, with few
exceptions, all vowels in each word match as one or the other. This comes
easily to native speakers, but others may have a hard time hearing and
reproducing the contrasts involved.
Turkic and Indo-European language areas meet here in the Caucasus, but the
local scene is complicated by the strong presence of two other linguistic
families, Kartvelian and North Caucasian. Languages from both families can
baffle Indo-European and Turkic speakers with alien vocabulary and long
clusters of often glottalized consonants. But the Kartvelian lineage,
including Georgian and Laz, may be a sibling to Indo-European, as suggested by
lexical similarities (which may also reflect interfamily borrowing): Georgian
for cat is k'at'a , for example, and ekvsi 'six' and shvidi 'seven'
may look vaguely familiar. And those infamous glottals? More bark than bite:
to conquer the k in k'at'a, put your tongue in the k position while
holding your breath, then let air pop out almost simultaneously both through
your throat opening and over your tongue. Languages worldwide use glottals,
but Georgian is unusual in giving these consonants a primary, default status in
the sound system, such that foreign words borrowed into Georgian get their
voiceless consonants glottalized, like it or not. Another weird thing about
Georgian: mama means dad and deda means mom -- crucial to
remember when asking DNA sample donors about their family histories!
Some Georgians say their language is closely related to another
non-Indo-European language from a rugged part of Eurasia: Basque. At a Tbilisi
conference on the two cultures, we anticipated hearing evidence for such a
link, but, despite provocative paper titles, no comparative linguistic data was
presented; right now a specific Basque-Georgian classification would be
premature at best.
The North Caucasian languages, quite different from Kartvelian despite sharing
phonetic features like glottals, have also been posited to be part of a wide,
geographically sporadic family of isolated languages, from Basque to Navaho,
but strong evidence for such mop-up classification is still missing. We
encountered Lezgi, a North Caucasian language, in the northern Azerbaijan
orchard towns of Quba and Qusara.
Georgian liturgical chant, recorded in Sveti Tskhovili Cathedral, Mtsketa
Mingreli speaker says a common Georgian tongue-twister which translates
as 'the frog croaks in the water.' In standard Georgian, the tongue-twister
is baq'aq'e ts'khalshi q'iq'ineps; note that our informant's Mingreli accent
drops the q in favor of a simple glottal stop.
Ossetian, Q'azbegi region
In the speech patchwork of the Caucasus we found three more Indo-European languages: Armenian, Ossetian and Russian. The last, part of the Balto-Slavic subgroup, is lingua franca in regions formerly under Soviet rule. Young Armenians, Azeris and Georgians are less compelled to learn Russian than their parents were, but the language is still valued here for its international utility and literary heritage. Armenian is a puzzlingly divergent member of Indo-European, while Ossetian, spoken in the central Great Caucasus, is related fairly closely to Farsi. We found common ground with Ossetians when, pointing to my arm, I asked a speaker in halting Russian what his language termed this body part. 'Arm,' he answered.
Numerals are commonly used by linguists for linguistic comparison. This provides only paltry data, in the form of an over-learned sequence, but is an interesting place to start.
1. Yerevan-born speaker counts 1-10 in Armenian (Hayeren).
2. Mingreli speaker counts 1-10 in Georgian (Kartuli).
3. Ossetian speaker counts 1-10.
4. Azeri speaker counts 1-10.
5. Lezgi speaker counts 1-10.
6. Azeri speaker counts 1-10 in Russian.
Fiddle maker, Baku |
 Soda fountain, Tbilisi |
 Fast food, Armenia |
GEORGIA'S ALWAYS ON MY MY MY MY MY MY MY MY MY MIND
by Mark Read
Well, it would be if I hadn't had a two hour blackout as a result of a Georgian meal hosted by our incredibly generous friends, who from the moment we arrived in Tbilisi have attended to our every need.
The highlight of a stay in Georgia is being invited to the home of your guests, where a meal of incredible culinary diversity will be accompanied by the heartfelt words of the Tamada (Georgian toast-master) and at least a bottle and a half per head of Vodka.
Now there are ways of sidestepping the vodka marathon. You can put up with the
slurs on your manhood ( oh yeah this is a testosterone thang), accusations of
being a spy, or you can simply offer to drive home. But with the state of
Georgian roads, it's the drunk drivers who are going straight (into the
numerous potholes). These tactics however need to be asserted at the very
beginning, there is no way out once you have begun.
The toasts start on fairly general themes and progressively get more and more personal, not unlike getting drunk with your mates down the pub. What is unusual is the depth and heartfelt honesty, along with the ever controlling Tamada who makes sure the rules are obeyed.
A good toast is rewarded by an empty glass slammed on a table, a bad one is received with nods of understanding and a sip of Voddy. The Tamada however can never sip, for sipping would strip him of his coveted title.
Half way through the evening and 20 vodka's down, I was regretting not going for the earlier spy option, this is the point when the Tamada truly comes into his own. "Mark, why you don't drink? Darius is my friend he drinks with me, Darius is a true Georgian!" Ouch that hits hard, how ever long you spend with Georgians the one thing you would want is to be accepted as a native. "The way you can down those moules and frites, you're looking like a real Belgian" it's not really the same.
So I pick up the glass, take a deep breath and down it goes. Recovering from Lady Vodka's bite I open my eyes to see glee on every ones face, I am back and I am going to be an honorary Georgian if it kills me.
The toasting raises in tempo and humour, gauntlets are thrown down left and right, to hold your own on the toasting floor is quite a feat. Replies are made to previous toasts always raising the gambit. At a certain point the Tamada will bring the drunken rabble to order and will toast lost friends and family. At this point even the most hardened heart will crack. Silence follows, I vaguely remember being aware of swaying slightly and feeling how irreverent I must have seemed.
The next toast is to Love, Georgian woman and then hell, why not, woman the world over. As we have three hours earlier toasted our wives and girlfriends one feels that they wouldn't mind you lumping the rest of the woman on the planet in to one solitary toast.
The evening ends with...well I am not quite sure as this is the point that my first ever (very scary) blackout occurred. Allegedly I was lying on my back in the Land Rover kicking the ceiling in time to Mama by the Spice Girls on Tblisi FM. The hour I spent slurring to our host and Tamada, Irakli, was also lost. Ever the professional, Darius thought it should be filmed. Watching a video of a completely lost memory is a bizarre and disconcerting experience. And although I spent the majority of the flick falling off things, there was a look in Irakli's eye that said that maybe I had Georgian potential after all.
ON THE ROAD
by Darius Bazergan
Anyone who has browsed the EurAsia '98 website will have come across the route map and itinerary we intend to follow. Starting from the rural calm of the Essex countryside in Britain, our lone Land Rover intends to chart a course across Europe to the depths of Siberia and back - via such assorted destinations as Georgia and Iran.
It all looks fairly straightforward on the map, doesn't it? Easy, see; the red Land Rover follows the red line on the map. It starts in one place and ends in the other. But there's rather a lot of the world to cover in between, don't you agree?
So what's it been like on the road, you might ask. Good question. Although the five of us on this expedition are all colleagues or friends, living on the move is not always easy. Sleeping, washing, eating and driving - usually mundane aspects of normal life all become contentious issues when you are living out of a jeep.
We have nightly rested our bones in a variety of dwellings from tents perched on the side of Turkish mountains to the flea infested carpets of decaying Soviet-era housing projects. We once inhabited the relative opulence of a three bed roomed apartment in a professional district of the Georgian capital Tblisi - the only problem was that, despite there being all mod-cons, running water was limited to two hours daily.
Another time the Maxillo-Facial hospital ward of the Mikaelian Surgical Institute in Armenia was our home. Hospitals depress me at the best of times. But at least when you are ill, you feel they might be doing you some good. But the world of the sick, crippled, miserable and convalescent is no place to be when you are able bodied. "Grrd Norrning," our next-door neighbour used to greet us through his wired-together jaw - a side effect of legendary Transcaucasian driving etiquette.
I write all this from a rented apartment in the old town of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. An interesting place, Baku. But more of that later. The best thing about the Azeri capital, or rather, the best thing about this apartment, is that it has a nominally working shower and we have been able to wash properly for the first time in over a week. Gone now is the foul under-arm lasagna of layered sweat and deodorant - the stock in-trade of people trying to maintain the ability to socialise with strangers, but who are incapable of locating running water.
The distance between Tblisi and Baku is about five-hundred and fifty kilometers. Georgian roads are tortuously slow because of the potholes, or rather, the remaining chunks of metalled road that somehow survive in-between.
Our Land Rover Discovery seats four in comfort, but there are five of us. And we have luggage - we have a lot of luggage. We have all the scientific equipment Spencer, Nat and Ruslan need, all the video, audio and camera gear that Mark and I use, and all our clothes and books, laptops and camping stuff - not to mention the Land Rover's tool-kit, winching gear, spare parts and Biff - a small, cuddly cow that Mark's girlfriend secreted in his luggage as a love gift before he left London.
In short, the vehicle is very heavy, very crowded and not the most pleasant place to be when you have to travel across the rutted roads of Asia with no personal space, and you and everyone around you smell bad because you haven't had a bath for a week or washed your clothes for a fortnight.
Tempers can fray on the long-haul twelve hour non-stop road trips. We all play a subtle, selfish game of musical chairs pretending that we don't mind who drives or gets to sit in the front passenger seat - the definitive Des-Res locations, all the while secretly trying to remain in these plum positions for as long as is humanly possible.
Yesterday, however, I think we may have found a way round the spine-distorting discomfort of EurAsia 98 back-seat driving. It is called vodka. Spencer and myself, through tireless research, have discovered that if you drink enough of it, you don't really care about where you sit - or anything else for that matter.
OIL TOWN
by Darius Bazergan
Baku is an oil town. It's an odd city. The road in from Georgia winds through ugly desert-like scrub and is dominated on either side by the mechanistic, rusting hulks of the oil extraction industry past and present. Oil derricks in their hundreds crowd the skyline like a metallic forest, beside them, endless lines of telephone pylons, electricity cables and electrified railway power lines stride across the scorched earth like steel Stakhanovites marching off to work, successfully fulfilling the targets of the last half-century's five year plans.
This is Industry! This is Progress! Progress is Good!
The marshalling yards and sidings are full of rail-borne petrol tankers, while pipelines full of oil and gas splay out in every direction, bearing the product off to vast storage tanks shimmering through the heat far in the distance. The highway is crowded with long-distance TIR lorries bearing Teheran plates. They and their weary, moustachioed, cigarette smoking Iranian drivers fume on together deeper into Central Asia.
Replete with the decaying shells of long-abandoned ships, the oily Caspian Sea laps against a rubbish strewn shore whose inland lagoons are pools of sulphurous yellow chemicals. Strange smogs drift across the sand.
Oil pool, Baku
Uncountable oil pumps grind and suck the precious liquid up from the thousands of bore holes, while drills scour the ground for oil, oil and yet more oil. The horizon is penetrated a thousand times to the left and right. It is as if the earth itself is being raped. She gives in to the silent cheers of a baying mob of business men waiting above.
This is Business! This is Money! Money is Good!
The road into Baku is a vision of Hell. And it bodes ill for weary traveller, despite the compelling aspect of this vision of a petrochemical apocalypse.
So it is strange to report that the city of Baku itself as actually a pretty, friendly place. The architecture is an unusual eclectic mixture of sandstone Islamic influenced Turkic styles - with a hint, perhaps, of art deco. Bold Soviet structures gone to seed jostle with delicate, almost Parisian touches; carefully wrought iron balconies and window frames. Alongside all this, the ultra-modern products of new oil money are juxtaposed in an engaging mish-mash.
Baku architecture
It reminds me of an architectural version of those annual class photos you used to get at primary school; the lanky-geeky kid who was always picked last at football is standing next to the chubby girl in pigtails, and she herself is next to the tall girl with long (blonde?) hair everyone fancied but never kissed. Baku is colourful, different and unlike anywhere I've ever been before.
Down by the seafront families dressed up to the nines stroll through the trees, small children drive around the promenade in battery operated plastic mini jeeps and cars that are for hire. Old men play chess and dominoes in the shade of trees, while younger men attempt games of pool and billiards on tables the sea air has warped into surfaces more akin to crazy golf than green baize. Offshore, far in the distance, oil rigs can be made out through the summer haze.
There are new boutiques, restaurants and night-clubs everywhere - great for those that can afford them. Mercedes Benz and BMW are de rigeur - and unlike most other parts of the Former Soviet Union, these ones are bought un-stolen from licensed dealers.
Want to make money? You've got to stay in touch. No problem in Baku, Amigo! Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola are all in town; hook your unit up on GSM via Azercell and you can be talking to Rotterdam or Houston in seconds. The sun is rising over Baku, it is a town on the make. Baku is an oil town undergoing a renaissance. Oil is money and Baku is in the money.
That is to say, the nice parts of Baku are like this. The parts of Baku the government would want you to see. But back and beyond the city most visitors see is the down side of the new oil boom. The invisible Baku.
While Western oil men fly in to stitch up their latest deal with eager Armani-suited Azeri government officials, the people of invisible Baku are living a life of contaminated indigence among a toxic industrial carnage of oil wells hidden from view behind vast billboards proclaiming the wit and wisdom of Azerbaijan's President Aliyev. A hugely popular man, so it would seem, he won an impressive 96 per cent of the vote in the last election.
In invisible Baku we see children whose playgrounds are the nodding donkey oil pumps which drone on day and night spewing glistening filth from leaking pipes. The air is moist with a chemical fog. It leaves your hair and skin greasy after being out in it for only a few minutes. What must it be like to be born into that environment? What must it be like to live there all your short, poisoned life?
A pool of oil and sand stretches fifty feet in front of me. To the left the oil pumps clank on and on. The pump wheels spin and drive the hammer-headed steel up and down, up and down. A hundred pipes drip rusty water and leak toxins into the ground. Across the shimmering black surface of the oil and over the cracked, dusty brown earth a mother and her young son wend their way to the corrugated iron shack they call home.
Back in town bottles of ice cold imported beer is being knocked back in American owned bars like Margaritaville, Ragin' Cajun and an incongruous Irish-style pub called Finnegan's. Champagne bottles are cracked open in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency Hotel. The booze, like the oil is flowing freely in Baku. Cheers!
Houston on the Caspian
What sort of a world is this that we live in, we wonder to ourselves. What forces drive this injustice ever onward, we muse as we step back into the safety of our Land Rover, slam the doors shut and gun the V-8 engine into life. It growls back in recognition and we storm away from the state orchestrated indigence in our fifty-thousand dollar comfort machine. On the CD Moby screams out a cover version of the Joy Division song New Dawn Fades.
THOUGHTS ON CHANGE
by Ruslan Ruzibakiev
I first visited Tbilisi in 1980, when I stayed in the Hotel Iveria. At that time I was amazed at the beautiful buildings and very nice, kind people. On that visit I discovered such Georgian cultural traditions as their "primitivist" painters and poets - e.g. Rustaveli. On this return visit I saw obvious similarities, but there were other things as well: The Hotel Iveria - formerly one of the best buildings in Tbilisi - now houses refugees and looms gloomily over the Tbilisi skyline.
There are many other changes which are typical of the post-Soviet period: shops, coffee houses, new firms, etc. Rich and poor jostle somewhat uncomfortably side-by-side. But the Georgian people are kind and friendly as in the past - full of humor and a love of fun.
I was in Yerevan, Armenia in 1986. It seems to me that it has not changed much. Despite the many refugees, it looks like a beautiful capital - unique brown and red buildings constructed of the local 'tuff' stone. One of the obvious features of is the large number of English speakers. For example, a soldier on the Georgian-Armenian border greeted us with "hello, what is your name."
Now that we have left Armenia, I will remember the hospitality of the Armenian people, as well as their hopes and ambitions for the future. Their will to survive in the face of enormous difficulties bodes well for the country.
Baku has surprised me. I have seen many beautiful and extraordinary old buildings - some restored, but others crumbling. I feel that this city has a very bright future, as exemplified by the large number of modern buildings under construction. One of the major problems is that of refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh - around 1.5 million people came to the Baku region during the conflict with Armenia. The government has done everything within its power to deal with this influx of people - provided housing, jobs, etc.
One of the typical features of Baku is its kind people. Many people are found strolling in the streets or enjoying themselves in the parks of the city. All are nice and kind, ever helpful. Baku and its people live with great hope for the future.
Next post: Iran
