On the morning of 25th June 1829, a young Russian poet gazed with awe at the supposedly impregnable Ottoman fortress of Kars, which had been captured by the Russian Army of the Caucasus just a year before. Alexander Pushkin had come from Moscow via the so-called Georgian Military Highway from Vladikavkaz to Tiflis, and from there to Gyumri and Kars, crossing the Russian-Ottoman frontier to visit friends in the Russian army. He would later write in his travel notes, “touring the fortifications and the citadel, built on a sheer cliff, I could not see how we had managed to capture Kars.”
In the course of the 19th century Russian forces attacked Kars four times, and captured it on three of those occasions, returning it twice to the Ottomans before occupying it in 1878, supposedly permanently–only to see it returned to the Ottomans in 1918 and eventually to the new Republic of Turkey. Like so many sites in the Caucasus and Crimea, it became sanctified by its association with Pushkin, who ...


