Parfitt, a British journalist, has been haunted by nightmares since covering the horrific hostage crisis in Beslan, North Ossetia, in 2004, when an insurgent attack on a school killed more than 330 people, mostly children. Four years later, he undertook a month-long journey through the Russian North Caucasus. His initial goal was to observe some other Caucasus, not just the place of terrorism, kidnappings and armed conflicts. Equipped with Soviet-era paper maps, a compass and a “dumb” phone without Internet access, he traveled through seven autonomous republics in this part of Russia, traversing vast desert spaces where he encountered shepherds, hermits and fugitive criminals. , but also wild. wild boars and wolves. In densely populated Dagestan, where he, he says, “hospitality is sacrosanct,” strangers greeted him every night for three weeks. In this magnificent and moving travel story, gratitude and wonder are exchanged with worry and exasperation. His descriptions of “breathtaking” mountain landscapes are intertwined with tragic stories of expulsions, deportations and extermination of entire ethnic groups in the 19th-century Russian Empire and Stalin’s Soviet Union.
