You will be surprised that 15 Caucasus peaks exceed Western Europe's highest peak Mont Blanc. The Caucasus has: 200 peaks over 4000m, 30 over 4500m, and 7 over 5000m (via lonely planet link ).
The Circassians themselves are so ancient and they love to show their guests a genuine sense of hospitality. We thought the excerpt below from Frederik Coene's book The Caucasus - An Introduction ( link ) says a lot about the rich culture and the mythology that live in the Caucasus.
"the Nart sagas, which form the basis of the mythology of the North Caucasian tribes, play an important cultural role, especially for those living in the western region.
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The Narts were a tribe of heroes that came after the giants, whom they exterminated, and before the human race. They were the sons of Satanaya, a beautiful, wise and immortal young woman.
The central theme of the sagas, which were handed down orally by bards and written down only from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, is the heroic activities of the warriors, who fought, hunted, feasted and debated.
Several theories claim that they had a strong influence on the cycle of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table as well as on Greek mythology. Prometheus, just like the Nart Sosriko, stole fire from the Gods and gave it to mankind, for which his punishment was to be chained to a rock in the Caucasus and have his liver eaten daily by an eagle.
Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian authors participated in the military conquest of the Caucasus and described the beauty but also the peculiarities of the region in their literary works. The most famous of these are Pushkin's poem Captive of the Caucasus, Lermentov's novel A Hero of our Time"
