Derbent: A Passage Through Five Thousand Years

In the sixth century, a Persian king named Khosrow Anushirvan understood something the Greeks, Persians, and Scythians had already grasped before him: whoever controls this three-kilometer corridor between the Caucasus mountains and the Caspian Sea controls everything that moves through it. So he built a wall here. Two walls, actually — running down from a hilltop fortress straight into the water, sealing the passage shut like a bolted door. The old Persian word for this place, "darband," means exactly that: "closed gate."

Look at the walls of the Naryn-Kala fortress above the city — there, running down the slope. The stones were laid under the Sasanian Persians, and they've outlasted Arab invasions, a Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century, and Russian garrisons after that. These days people take selfies against them. History, it turns out, is patient.

In twenty-fifteen, Derbent threw itself a grand two-thousandth birthday — official, presidential decree and all. Archaeologists, for their part, gently point out that the first settlements here go back not two thousand but five thousand years, to the late fourth millennium BC. A small rounding error — off by only three thousand years. The Greek writer Hecataeus of Miletus was already describing these "Caspian Gates" in the sixth century BC, and Herodotus after him. Then again, cities, like people, sometimes prefer to shave a few centuries off their age.

And yet this is the city UNESCO singled out as one of the most tolerant on earth — because for centuries, mosques, synagogues, and churches have stood side by side here without conflict, and a local resident might switch between Russian, Azerbaijani, and Lezgin mid-sentence without a second thought.

A city that got its birth certificate three thousand years late — and still isn't in any hurry.

An episode like this takes about two minutes to make: name a topic, and the rest is done for you. moygid dot online.