Thus far unreported but no less enjoyable for that, my Caucasian shadow journey has been underway for a while now. 

No doubt the citizens of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan would be horrified to see their highly distinctive countries lumped together in this way. But a lot of the things I want to cover involve more than one Caucasian nation. It would be messy to try to separate them. 

After Greece, these countries were the big new experience of last year's trip. Everything about them was an amazing revelation. They all yielded unexpected rewards. 

Which is why it's doubly heart-breaking to see two of them fighting each other at the moment... 




Usefully bridging Turkey, the focus of my last shadow journey, and the Caucasus, my next regional objective, was Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul, which I mentioned in my last shadow post. 

Its rich colour and brisk pace made it a good book to listen to (although I was constantly irritated by the narrator's adoption of "foreign accents" for the non-anglophone characters even when they were supposed to be talking to each other in their own language -- I mean, WHY!?). 

Apart from this (not the author's fault, of course) there were a few elements I didn't like about this book itself. It was, as several reviews have noted, too ambitious, attempting to cover way too much ground. Plus, I'm not a fan of magic realism; some of the coincidences do stretch credulity; and I particularly disliked the cast of "types" who frequent Armanoush's diasporic chat room and Asya's beloved Cafe Kundera (the latter, in particular, are far too one-dimensional to be called characters, and are so sketchily presented that they don't even have names, a contrivance that necessitates the increasingly tedious repetition of their cumbersome epithets -- the "Dipsomaniac Cartoonist", the "Non-nationalist Scenarist of Ultranationalist Movies", and so on).





But those beefs aside, it was a worthwhile listen. You can't help but respect and admire the courage of the undertaking. Shafak, like Orhan Pamuk and other Turkish authors, feels that Turks must face up to and take responsibility for what happened to the Armenians (and other minorities) in the early years of the 20th century. She acknowledges that the situation was highly complex, and there are things the Armenians must address too. But her bottom line is that it's not OK to forget, or pass such violent episodes off as the deeds of a previous polity in a previous era (any more than it's OK for the descendants of colonialists to shrug off responsibility in that way). One of the protagonists commits a horrible crime, and then goes off to America to rebuild his life. He becomes an outwardly decent and respectable guy. But the unexpiated crime moulders away in the background, and ultimately causes his downfall. It's an allegory for Turkey's situation, the author suggests. 





On a more workaday level, I loved the evocation of the multi-generational female household in Istanbul. It's a larger-than-life little group, for sure, but their quirkiness is wonderfully entertaining. 

And I very much appreciated the lovingly intricate food descriptions (ashure, the dessert whose ingredients constitute the chapter titles, is now top of my must-eat-one-day-in-Turkey list...) 

Talking of food, I've had a go at replicating a couple of the Georgian dishes we really loved when we were there...

Admittedly, it's hard, anywhere outside Georgia, to match the quality of the key ingredients in the famous tomato, cucumber, and walnut salad (and as for blue fenugreek and marigold, well, forget it...). But this really wasn't bad:


I don't think we had this stuffed capsicum dish while we were there, but it's super-tasty:


And when I came across a low-carb version of Georgia's famous cheese bread, it had to be tried. I was a bit dubious about the dough I produced, which seemed stickier and much less manageable than the description in the recipe. But the result was absolutely delicious (and I'm happily remembering that there are still two portions hidden away in the freezer).