Transcaucasia : Urban exploration between past and modernity

Georgia, Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh (2017)

Transcaucasia, sometimes also named South Caucasus, is composed of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, along with several disputed entities such as Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The region, located at a crossroads between different cultural areas and powers, has had an eventful history. It has undergone various transformations during periods of Ottoman, Russian and Soviet influence and rule, and particularly since its fragmentation into sovereign nation states in the 1990s. Today, Tbilisi and Yerevan, the respective capitals of Georgia and Armenia, epitomise the most recent mutations of those young states in quest for a new identity, shifting between Orthodox roots, Soviet past, dynamics of modernisation and greater openness to the world.