1. The World at Gunpoint

The sun always shines on a terrace of Rasul Magomedov's home. He is the head of the Dagestani village of Balakhani, and the sunlit terrace is where he does the most of his work. He lives with his wife, Patimat, while their grown-up children left the paternal home long ago for a city life.

Rasul has build a new house for his eldest son, a successful professional boxer, just in front of his own. In Dagestan, even if young people leave the villages, they or their parents build a house for them so that there is always a place to come back.

Rasul and Patimat often set a table with tea and sweets for their guests on the terrace. Its window clearly overlooks a road leading to the village. Rasul sits down on a chair and looks through a telescope. He will be the first to see if guests of another kind – armed security forces – decide to visit the village. They always come without an invitation or notification.

A gathering of the village’s manhood, Jamia, has elected Rasul to his position of the Balakhani head. According to the ancient traditions, democracy is done by the villagers coming to the central square, godekan, and voting for a person whom they would like to run the village affairs.

Rasul has a difficult job to do, since it is difficult to run such a village as Balakhani. Criminality is not a problem there, but police consider it as a place of radical Islam, a movement that must be suppressed. Warplanes have dropped 16 bombs at Balakhani over the last three years, let alone dozens of counterterrorist operations that always start unexpectedly, with rattling tanks rushing in the village, the immediate blockade of the whole of Balakhani, and police searching every house.

They look for militants. Usually, they don't find anyone and after subjecting the men to fingerprint, getting on the women's nerves and frightening the children, they leave the village empty-handed. Such operations may last several days or even weeks, with life in the village stopping for these periods.

Balakhans, representatives of the combative Dagestani tribe of Avars, settled in Balakhani a thousand years ago. The village is protected by unscalable mountains surrounding it, and one can get into it only through a road which is seen from the top of the cliff on which the village stands. Hence the name “Balakhani,” which in Avar means “a protected place beyond the edge of a mountain.” For hundreds of years, the mountains have protected Balakhans from their foes, giving them, at the same time, enough space to live freely.

The current population of Balakhani is some seven thousand people. It's always sunny there, and every year, when spring comes, the village is smothered in white and pastel-pink laces of blooming peach and apricot trees.

Still remembering the Soviet times, the era of communal and state farms, all settlements in Dagestan are called hamlets or villages. But every Dagestani language has its own word for a settlement.

19-century writers, who literally were the first Russian Caucasus explorers, called a Muslim rural settlement an “aul.” The concise word of “aul” tends to express 

much better the spirit of these remote mountain villages and the freedom-loving people living there.

The Balakhani buildings look as if they are hanging on the cliff and continuing one another. The buildings gradually go down the cliff, and one can easily use their roofs as a staircase to make it down from the very top of the cliff. This stony “staircase” looks as if it is growing from the cliff, with the central square, where Jumia gathers, being its essential part.

Rasul looks at the road tangled among the rocks through the window of his terrace and waits. His duty is to secure the delicate balance of peace in the village and ensure that the mountains, which have guarded his people for centuries, to serve for its protection nowadays, too. 

2. The Terrorist's Mother

A small laptop, ID, photos of her children, cell phone, recharger, money... Every time, when Patimat Magomedova leaves her home and goes to work, she takes all the valuable belongings with her. Every evening, going back home, she doesn't know if her home is still safe, or all that she will see is ruins. Her home can be blown up anytime, just like homes of other Balakhani people.

Patimat has been living in Balakhani, her native aul, all her life, and she has never gone anywhere outside Dagestan. Everyone respected Patimat, a pattern wife, mother of three children and a teacher of Dagestani peoples’ traditions at a local school. She was leading an ordinary life, always complying with traditions and principles of her nation.

Everything crushed down at the very moment in March 2010 when her daughter, Maryam Sharipova, blew herself up at Lubyanka metro station in Moscow. Lives of 44 people were cut short by that terrorist attack, and Patimat, too, has lost her “life.” She will never be an ordinary teacher, wife and mother again; she has turned into “the terrorist's mother.”

Her husband, Rasul Magomedov, a 59-year old history teacher, went missing in 2012. He went on a business trip to Makhachkala and didn't come back. Now police regularly come to the Patimat’s house, ransack it, and mock her grief, saying her husband is being kept in a secret jail.

Every time, a glimmer of hope illuminates Patimat’s sole, but a common sense tells her that Rasul is dead. People often go missing in Dagestan, and after some time their corpses are found with signs of torture on them. But Rasul's body has not been found.

Patimat's eldest son has received a political asylum in Europe; it's dangerous for him to come back to his native village for police would likely to persecute him. The younger son, Ilyas, has joined the militants just after he was arrested for an alleged robbery and tortured. Although police let him go eventually, he believed they would never let it alone. He could leave Dagestan for good, but police seized his passport, and he had no other choice than go to militants living in the mountains.

Of course, it would be wrong to say that everyone in Dagestan is innocent. But the problem is that if a person comes into the view of police, he or she will always be a suspect, or at least a suspicious person. Presumption of innocence doesn't work there, just like it doesn’t work at war.

Patimat lives with her daughter-in-law and three little grandchildren in a spacious, empty house. They always speak in undertones there but even whisper echoes loudly around the rooms.

The house of the “terrorist's family” can be blown up in any moment – such is a new unspoken rule in Dagestan. For this reason, their relatives took everything from the house, leaving women with children to sleep on the floor.

Patimat’s life is merely the short patches between everlasting police visits that usually take place late night or early morning. Her little grandchildren understand that an armed man, who wears a uniform, dirty army boots and comes to their home and puts rude affronts upon their grandmother, is evil. But there's nothing good in the world at all. There's no one to complain to, there are no roads to go, because for all their family is “the terrorist's family.”

“What I should live for?” Patimat asks. “Inside, I'm already dead.” She looks at her home with an empty, dry-eyed look. She doesn't know whether it still be there when she comes back home.

3. The WHO Territory

In the year of 2013, life in the aul of Gimry does not differ much from what it was like 200 or 300 years ago. There’s still no gas or water supply there. People take water from the nearby springs and bring it to their homes in buckets, with only one of the springs giving potable water. Other springs don’t serve the villagers well, having water so hard that even soap doesn’t form a lather.

The Middle Age hardships fall into the shade, however, with new threats being more dangerous. For several years, Gimry has been the territory for a counterterrorism operation, or CTO which in Russian means “who.”

In 2007, as a part of the operation, military forces bombarded a grove located by the aul. Since then, the number of Gimry residents diagnosed with cancer has risen significantly. People believe that airstrikes has stirred up the mercury deposits discovered way back in the Soviet times and that their fumes exposing from the bowels of the earth affect their health.

The Caucasus Mountains are young, so every bomb attack is so noxious that it takes 50 years for the mountains to be recovered, scientists say.  

The WTO operation has ended with nothing, and the militants managed to escape.

By the way, Gimry means “pear” in Avar. Long ago, pear trees grew in a ravine there. Now Gimry are more famous for its apricot gardens and a specific brand of date plum, a small dark flavoured fruit. Due to favorable climate, apricots ripen there earlier than in other parts of Dagestan and have a unique taste.

The gardens there are artificial and terraced. For ages mountain dwellers have been bringing earth to the naked rocks, chocking it with untooled stones so that rain doesn’t wash the precious soil out. Every planted tree is a treasure for a mountain dweller who cherish it as he cherishes a child.

In 2010, when a counter-terrorist operation was held, Gimry’s apricot trees were cut over with an ax. The military forces blocked the village for eight months then and every night, they were making fires of the freshly-cut apricot trees. They were tracing the militants but failed to find a single one of them.

In 2013, the special forces decided to try another approach and moved all the resident from their homes to tents. For a whole month, they’ve been holding the village in subjugation. They turned all the houses upside down. When leaving the aul, they blew up 10 houses, saying those were the homes of militants’ relatives.

The WHO is still ongoing, with military forces standing at the approaches to the village, holding a permanent threat over its residents.  

But what is more important is that a military camp makes difficult for the villagers to get to their gardens. Every patch is as good as gold for Dagestani people who still tell an old parable about it:

Once upon a time, a mountain dweller decided to give his land a tilth. Since his patch was located far from his aul, he started his way in the evening so that he can begin his work early in the morning. He came to his land, spread a piece of felt and fall asleep on it. When he woke up in the morning, he realised that his land had disappeared. He started to look for it but couldn’t find it anywhere. He couldn’t understand whether it was Allah who had taken it to punish him for his sins, or devil had hidden it to mock him. The man grieved but couldn’t do anything and was going to go back to his aul. He raised the felt from the ground, and, oh, here’s his land, under the felt.”

There’s too few land in Dagestan, and the mountain dwellers were never willing to share it with anyone and never would do that. And this, what has changed little over the ages, too.

5. Gate of Gates

“Dawn gasped when she first saw it,” such were the words of a 19-century Russian writer Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky about Derbent.

Derbent is the heart of the Southern Dagestan. The Caucasus Mountains don’t come to the shores of the Caspian Sea so close in any other parts of the republic. The fortress city of Derbent is located in the narrow passage – which is only three kilometres wide – between the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus Mountains.

The name of the city of Derbent derives from the Persian Darband, meaning “locked gate.” Greeks called the city the Albanian Passage, Romans – the Khazar Gates, while Arabs fascinated by the beauty of the city named it Bāb al Abwab, or “gate of gates.” Derbent has been known through the ages as a border dividing Europe and Asia.

The history of the city is mottled, with Mountain Jews, also known as Tats, coming to this land together with Persians some 1500 years ago and founding there the largest Jewish community in the Caucasus area. They also found a mahalla, a neighbourhood with the main street called Keleh Koocheh, which means “long street.” The street goes down from the foothill to the sea, with a large synagogue located there.

There used to be 11 synagogues in Derbent but only one has survived. The synagogue was built by five brothers, the Khanukayev’s merchants. It was opened in 1914 but over the years has fallen to decay, and restoration work was launched several years ago.

“The work has been going slowly,” says Ovadya Iskhakov, synagogue rabbi. “According with the Jewish rules, it is not allowed to destroy religious buildings, so we’ve been dismantling it carefully, a stone after stone, indexing each of them. These stones were put into the foundation and the walls of a new synagogue.”

Both Iskhakov’s parents are Derbent-natives, but he grew up in Makhachkala and graduated from an art school in Moscow. Only then he realized what he wanted to do in his life. He came back to Derbent to be a rabbi in the synagogue.

Jews are perpetuated in the history of the city, so to say, with symbols of their activity illustrated on the Derbent emblem. The emblem is presented as a silver shield featuring the signs of the city. Its lower part is divided into two sectors. The right one shows the Naryn-Kalyh gates and a rampart abutting the mountains from one side and the sea from another, while the left one features intertwisted roots of a madder and several poppy scapes tied up with a golden lasher as sign that the residents are successful in madder handling and cultivating poppy to produce opium. These were the main crafts of the city’s Jewish community.

The Jews cultivated the madder and extracted a rich red colour from it, developing the carpet weaving industry in Derbent. But they were not only producing madder, but also knew the secret techniques of woollen yarn coloring. Poppy and cannabis were produced medicinally only.

In 1990s, the majority of the Jewish community has left the city, and now there are no more than several thousand of Jews there, while the overall Derbent population is some 150,000 people.

Dagestan is facing hard times and even situation on the slumberous coastal city of Derbent is turbulent. In July, someone attempted to kill Ovadya Iskhakov, he barely survived. Police failed to find criminals. “But nevertheless, thousands years of living side by side with various nations and confessions can’t destroy our unity,” say people in the Jewish mahalla.

6. The small aul of Dzhynykh is abuzz over a grand occasion – Gadzhiyevs are giving in marriage their daughter, a history teacher at a primary school.

Dagestanis celebrate three days of wedding festivities by the whole village. It is a tradition to invite all residents to mark births, jubilees and deaths all together, regardless of whether an event is happy or mournful.

Traditions for Dagestanis are sacred; they are the foundation of the society, making it so unique. In a nod to the practice of building a new family, a young bride bidding farewell to her dreams and spilling tears resignedly prepares to a new life that was chosen for her by other people.

A bride and her fiance start to celebrate their wedding separately. Each of them invite people their homes, and an overflow of guests doesn’t stop morning until night there.

The second day, celebrations move to the godekan –  the village’s central square – with guests having a festive treat, dancing, singing and waiting for a bride and her fiance to make their appearance, with the latter being the highest point of the wedding festivities. After a dance with his bride, a fiance takes her to his home for good. The next day, all the guests honour the newly born family.

On the eve of the celebrations in the godekan, an aul starts to buzz from the early morning – villagers finish touches for the joint celebration. Even dogs sit quietly and don’t cramp the guests' style. Women prepare festive treating and move all the necessary things – chairs, tables, and tablecloths – to the brides’ homes, while men take care of the godekan, constructing tents for musicians and guests. Children are free to do what they want while no one look after them, but they oversee the bride’s home. According with traditions, she must be protected from prying eyes before joining her fiance.

She doesn’t take part at the celebrations as yet and, surrounded by her close friends in her room, spends time in a “rose-coloured anticipation.”

But in a tiny attic, with a large carved closet and flowered wallpaper, of 22-year old Saida Gadzhiyeva there’s neither joy, nor anticipation. The sun illuminates her pale face through a muslin curtain, showing the brilliant tears running down her cheeks.

“I studied at a teaching institute in Makhachkala and met Magomed there,” she says. “We fell in love with each other and wanted to get married, but my father said an adamant ‘no.’ My mother always wanted me to marry Ukhman. I don’t want to upset her. Now, it doesn’t matter who my fiance is.”

It is a great honour for an aul resident to send his children to study to the capital. Young people can escape from parental control for several years, substituting the mountain traditions with the city’s freedom. But these, so to say, holidays, do not last for long, and a strict father calls them back home very soon.

If Saida disobeyed her father, she would be cast out from her family. Caucasus women are still deprived of rights. A lack of the family support is seen as a stigma for the whole life.

Saida’s beloved Magomed is Avar. Marriages with residents of other auls are still very rare in Dagestan, and women are given in marriage to a man from her native village. It doesn’t depend on the level of devoutness of people in a village. Mountain dwellers live according with traditions, or “adats.” On the one hand, these strict rules have helped small ethnic groups to survive through the ages. But on the other hand, they sometimes cause little love dramas. Dagestani romeo and juliet do not kill themselves; they just put their lives on the chancel of tradition.

7. The coast of the Caspian Sea, mountains, and the Persian citadel of Naryn-Kalah that embraces Derbent with its jagged walls, smoothly going down from the mountains to the sea. Marvellous pastel-yellow puff-stone, which the city is built of, makes Derbent look like a sandcastle. Roses bloom here even in the depth of winter. Beautiful narrow streets in Magal and Mahalla, neighbourhoods in the city centre, with their flat roofs and tiny fanciful yards cascade from the mountains. A steady way of life of local residents hasn’t changed with time which seems to have freezed here.

Derbent was always a multinational city. Azerbaijanis, Greeks, Persians, Turks, Armenians, Jews, Russians, and Lezgians live here together, as well as Sunni and Shiite Muslims, worshipers of Orthodox Church and Protestant Church, Yahudis and Armenian Apostolic Church believers. Everyone managed to find a place in this city.

Derbent was being populated according with the following approach: Muslims settled at the upper and oldest part of the city, close to the Naryn-Kalah; Jews occupied the central lowland which is just below the bazaar; Armenians and Russians took the lowest part, closest to the sea.  

The Church of the Holy Saviour was built in the Armenian neighbourhood in 1870 on the site of an old chapel. Majestic outside and ethereal inside, the church is topped by a 12-side dome. But now the church serves as a historic museum, since there’s too few Armenian worshipers in the city and no clergymen at all. Yet the church is hallowed, and one has a feeling that it is the place of God on the earth when getting inside. A priest from another region comes to the city occasionally and holds child rites and wedding ceremonies there.

The last 30 years, an old woman called Zuya Magomedova has been carefully looking after the deserted church. At 6 a.m. every morning, she dusts fanciful carved patterns on the walls, washes heavy, stone floor slabs and then sits for long hours in the shade of columns thinking about something. As dusk descends on the city, she twists a key in a creaking lock of the church’s gates twice, and makes a circle around the church, bidding farewell to it until the next morning.

Zyua is Azerbaijani.

“We are not Azerbaijanis,” says craftsman Imran. “We are native of this city, we are Turkomen. Azerbaijanis were created by Stalin, we have nothing to do with them.” He looks after the church every day, too, from the threshold of his working shop located on a narrow street right in front of a side entrance to the church. His shop is known even beyond Dagestan. Imran does a very rare job – he’s a whitesmith and repairs copperware and tea-urns, known as “samovar” in Russian.

“Tea prepared on coals is a particular pleasure,” he says with a smile on his face, meaning tea prepared in samovar. “Especially when it’s hot outside. People have remembered it just recently and started to take samovars made in the czarist days from their attics and bring them to me. Before revolution, craftsmen knew how to make good things. Even people from other cities and auls come to me now.”

From dawn to dusk, Imran Beshirov sits on his tiny chair on a threshold of his shop. “Something is choking me inside,” he says. A rhythmical rattle of his hammer over a samovar has become an essential part of the slumbering seaside street, along with the majestic Armenian Сhurch of the Holy Saviour being such a part too.