In an interview on The Caucasus

There are so many different nationalities in the Caucasus and as many as 50 languages or dialects.  Nart Sagas of the Caucasus is your next book. Probably not one that people would have heard of!

This is a collection of folk tales of the Circassians, Abkhaz and other peoples from Western Caucasus who had a corpus of legends that were their equivalent of Greek myths. I actually had one read at my wedding. They’re very peculiar stories with lots of parallels with the Greek myths. For example, there’s an Achilles character called Sosruquo who, instead of having a weak point in his heel, has a weak point in his knee. He was boiling hot when he was born and when they dipped him in the blacksmith’s water to cool down, they held him by his knee and so that was the bit that didn’t harden.

These stories are all the more compelling because of the brutal oppression of the Circassians under the Tsars. They’re a really fascinating people, a huge part of ancient Mediterranean civilisation, but they pretty much vanished after the Russian invasion of the 1860s. The Russians gave them a choice to move north of the mountains and settle as peasants under Russian law or leave. I think they were quite surprised when a million or so Circassians chose to leave, but about a third of this group died in the course of the exodus. These events have since been recognised to be the first genocide of the modern age and I think the parallels with the Armenian genocide of 50 years later are clear.