ABSTRACT
In 1956, the German scholar, Erich Stockmann, published a paper comparing the traditional polyphonies of Epirus and the Caucasus. It is a tempting comparison, and although Stockmann's principal concern was with musical materials, the parallel could be extended to include strategies of appropriation, involving in each case predatory national, as well as minoritarian, narratives. Even in antiquity, the Caucasus was an imagined space. Its mountain regions, the accursed peaks of popular imagination, were dark, fateful places in mythology, legendary sites of hardship, suffering and savagery. The plains of ancient Colchis, with temperate climate and fertile soil, were a world apart from the inhospitable mountains of the interior, a contrast already registered in antiquity, notably by Strabo.
