Stained by strife
ger towns. We crossed the bridge of 100 000 martyrs — where Christians were massacred by yet another invading sultan — and entered the centre of Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital.
It has a lovely medieval heart of cobbled lanes, fretwork wooden buildings, a rambling fortress and some bizarre modern architecture tossed into the mix.
East we drove, through fertile plains in late-summer harvest, and over another limb of the Caucasus. Before reaching the Azerbaijan border post, we destroyed anything purchased in Armenia, even our Lonely Planet guide and bottles of Armenian water. Such is the hatred between neighbours.
We stopped at the Silk Road way point of Sheki, where restored caravanserais still dominate the town. Their massive doors once allowed the camels inside on cold nights. Then it was onward across the desert wastes of Azerbaijan, past mud volcanoes, derelict Soviet factories and rigs sucking black gold from the ground. Finally we reached Baku, a city drunk on the spoils of oil, with grand civic architecture to match and mansions of oligarch kitsch along a shoreline blackened by pollution.
On a ridge overlooking the old centre stand modern glass buildings of outrageous shapes and proportions. At dusk, their facades are lit to resemble flames, burning like strange omens above the beautiful-ugly city. Out in the Caspian Sea, I could make out oil rigs, working round the clock. Smaller rigs in the city drilled the earth like oversized hadedas. Beside me stood the martyrs’ memorials, dedicated to those killed by the Bolsheviks and by the Nazis and by Mikhail Gorbachev’s army in 1990 and, in another genocide (it is claimed), by Armenians and Bolsheviks in 1918. More blood, more hatred.
An orange moon, full and fiery, rose out of the Caspian. My Silk Road had come to an end. During the journey, I’d tried and failed to understand the complicated histories that inform this ancient road. So many individuals and powers have vied for control: kings and bandits, tsars and Ottomans, Muslims and Christians, and nowadays Vladimir Putin, Nato and a host of modern warlords. Old divisions and animosities are kept alive. Indeed, they are a kind of lifeblood in themselves, able to inflame a populace in a heartbeat.
And yet the land is breathtakingly beautiful, the architecture sublime and the people a mess of complicated charms. I’d been appalled, fascinated, enthralled. It had been a journey like no other.