ABSTRACT
Transcaucasia and the northern Caucasus-the region of the former Soviet Union bounded by the Black Sea and the Azov Sea to the west, the Caspian Sea to the east, international borders with Turkey and Iran to the south, and roughly delimited by a horizontal line drawn between the Don and the Volga rivers to the north-is a region of staggering ethnic and national complexity. There are at least 30 major ethnic groups within it, one of which, the Avars of Daghestan, can be subcategorized further into 12 different groupings. Nor do these 30 odd communities in the Caucasus live in discrete, compact geographic units; in some instances the degree of intermixing is profound.
