I had long considered the shtetl — Yiddish for the small Jewish towns of Eastern Europe — tragically all lost to the ravages of the Second World War. But then, against all historical expectation, I discovered that one shtetl (outside Israel and the United States) survived today — a living remnant from a world that had been under siege for centuries, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust. The final, astonishing twist is its location: the Shia-Muslim country of Azerbaijan.

My search for this lost world led me to Qırmızı Qəsəbə, the “Red Village,” home to the Mountain Jewish community, a group of Mizrahi (“eastern”) Jews who migrated to Azerbaijan after fleeing persecution in ancient Persia. Its population once peaked at 18,000, and has since declined to about 3,500 after waves of oppression from the Nazis and Soviets, and now further drops to around 500 in winter — typical of villages worldwide struggling to survive in an increasingly urbanized world. Yet the community clings to its traditions: the Sabbath is strictly observed, marriage is expected within the community, and the local matchmaker, who also doubles as the postman, preserves lineage. The Mountain Jews also speak Juhuri, a language related to Persian — distinct from the Muslim-Tat spoken just across the creek that separates the Jewish and Muslim halves of Quba.

The Red Village, I quickly realized, shatters the archetype of the European shtetl. This was no community isolated from society, but one so deeply integrated that its people fought and died for the nation. At the Mountain Jewish Musem in Quba, I learned that Jews from the region have a shared history of military service alongside their Muslim countrymen. Five hundred of them battled the Nazis in World War II; more recently, dozens became national heroes in the Nagorno-Karabakh War, like the tank commander Albert Agarunov, whose bronze statue I later saw in the capital.

The Red Village's extraordinary wealth is an even more striking departure from the impoverished world of Fiddler on the Roof. Home to billionaires like real estate developers God Nisanov and Zarakh Iliev, the Red Village might be the richest kilometer per capita on earth. I could visualize this claim on the streets, lined with garish mansions and refurbished synagogues draped in magnificent Persian carpets.

Among locals, this integration has earned the Mountain Jews a nickname that sounds like a paradox in the lexicon of global affairs: “Muslim Jews.” In any other country, the phrase would be an enigma, rooted in one of the sharpest divides of our time (although not of all times, as I wrote from the Khaybar Oasis in Saudi Arabia, where Judaism first encountered Islam). But in Azerbaijan, “Muslim Jew” is not a clash of civilizations — it’s a term of kinship and colloquial affection that I heard Azeris use to describe their own.

My trip to Quba, and later to the largely (but not exclusively) Jewish town of Oghuz, wasn’t just about discovering a new place; it was about rediscovering what’s possible in this fractured world.

In Oghuz, a town known by its former (now cleansed) Armenian name, Vartashen or “Valley of Roses,” I visited the Upper and Lower Synagogues. These spaces felt as much interfaith as they were Jewish. The caretaker, pleased to see rare visitors who venture a five-hour drive from the capital, told me how local Muslims join in celebrating Jewish holidays inside the sanctuary. He then asked me to remove my shoes before entering, just as one would in a mosque — a formality I had never encountered in any other synagogue worldwide. It was a perfectly "Muslim-Jewish" gesture, I thought. His tour concluded with a heartfelt request: that we wear a yarmulke and think of his community when we visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem, a place he himself had never been.

I came to understand that Azeri Jews are not a monolith; they are made up of Mountain Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, and Georgian Jews. The country is home to an estimated ten to thirty thousand Jews — a number that, in today's Muslim world, is a veritable metropolis. I saw evidence of this life in the nation's seven operating synagogues, four of which are Juhuri, including the monumental Six-Dome Synagogue I visited in Quba and the grand, modern synagogue in Baku, among the largest I’ve seen in Europe.

In Baku’s Juhuri synagogue, I was initially perplexed by photos of the Shia Muslim president, Ilham Aliyev, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — a stunning and unapologetic deviation from the regional (and increasingly global) norm. But I learned that Azerbaijan’s accommodation of its Jewish community goes beyond geopolitics. The Holocaust is taught in the public school curriculum as “the largest ever genocide committed against a people, solely because of their ethnicity” — a revolutionary acknowledgment in a part of the world often wary of providing any perceived fodder for Zionism.

The true essence of Azerbaijan's counter-narrative to the world lies in the subtle details of life (and death): the preservation of the Mountain Jewish language, Juhuri, in local education centers; a Jewish community that persisted in a city like Ganja after a devastating missile strike during the Nagorno-Karabakh War; and deceased Jews, their faces etched onto tombstones, buried side by side with their fellow Muslim Azeris.

Of course, I knew the Jewish community, like any other in this part of the world, could not have been without hardship. But what I discovered was that their darkest chapters tended to be Azeri experiences, not uniquely Jewish ones. During the Soviet era, synagogues were shuttered and turned into warehouses. When the Soviet Union fell and Azerbaijan gained its independence in 1991, these synagogues were reclaimed and restored with help from both the government and the diaspora. This comeback wasn't merely a reinstatement; it was an intentional statement about the future. Here, coexistence isn’t an uneasy truce; it’s an unwavering reflex in a world where it is anything but.

Superlative is where the anomalies of our world get the magnification they deserve. In Azerbaijan, I found an anomaly that felt less like an exception and more like a lesson. The divisions we accept as inevitable are, in fact, merely learned. Azerbaijan’s refusal to participate in one of the world’s most protracted divides isn't a grand political statement, but the simple, human result of a millennium of shared history.

🕹 Travel tip: The Mountain Jewish Museum in Quba, located in the 19th-century Karchog Synagogue, is a straightforward two-hour drive from Baku and is a worthwhile excursion. The story of this unique community is indeed compelling, but so are the stories of the people who come to see it. When I visited, I met a woman from Kuwait, her face concealed by a niqab that left only her eyes visible. She told me she was there to see "the Muslim Jews" — a startling phrase that perfectly captures the improbable, narrative-defying reality of the place.

It's easy to assume history's most important chapters are the ones we hear about, but a recent trip to Azerbaijan taught me otherwise. I had never heard of the kingdom of Caucasian Albania, an ancient Christian state that once stretched across the eastern Caucasus, until I met its last surviving descendants. In a world of vanished empires, this ancient one isn't just a footnote; it's a private, almost secret, inheritance of a few thousand people who live in two small, unassuming villages in Azerbaijan.

They are the Udi, a small community of around 4,000 that outlasted its state. To find them, I traveled to the villages of Nij and Oghuz in northern Azerbaijan, where I met a man named Ramin. He was a local historian and one of the last keepers of the Udi story. Here, in this quiet clearing in the fog of history, live the remnants of a people whose ancestors were among the first in the world to adopt Christianity as a state religion (nearly tied with Armenia). In the 4th century, King Urnair of Caucasian Albania (no relation to the Albania of today’s modern map) followed Tiridates III of Armenia and made the same bold, epoch-defining decision to be pioneers of Christianity at-scale.

But unlike Armenia, the state of Caucasian Albania did not survive. It was absorbed by larger empires, its distinct church suppressed, and its ancient script, once used in Bibles and official documents, was lost. The Udi’s little-known survival as a distinct ethnic and religious group is a defiance of historical gravity. They are a community that outlived its fallen empire, a faith that outlasted its official church, and speakers of a language that, for centuries, had no written form but has defied total extinction.

For a thousand years, the Caucasian Albanian language was considered dead. But then, in the late 20th century, a Georgian scholar discovered an upending palimpsest — a manuscript on which a new text had been written over an older scraped-off one. Beneath the Georgian writing was the long-lost Caucasian Albanian script. The breakthrough came when researchers realized this ancient script was a direct ancestor of modern Udi, a living, breathing, though critically endangered, language spoken in the Azeri villages of Nij and Oghuz. This tiny, remote community now holds the key to unlocking a lost chapter of human history.

In another world, the Udi story would be the subject of documentaries and academic conferences. But in the Caucasus, where history is often a weapon of war and not a subject of academic debate, the Udi have become a political pawn. In the context of the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the Udi's very existence makes for convenient propaganda. The Armenian narrative often frames the conflict over the once-disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region as a struggle between Christian Armenians and Muslim Azeris. The Udi, as an indigenous, non-Armenian Christian community that has survived in Azerbaijan for centuries, are a direct and inconvenient refutation of this framing.

The Azerbaijani government took note, drawing the Udi out of their historical shadows and promoting them as symbols of its multi-confessional state. They have supported the restoration of Udi chapels and championed their claim as the rightful heirs to the ancient Caucasian Albanian church. The Udi, whether they liked it or not, were rhetorical infantry on the war's propaganda front.

Many of the forgotten corners of this world that I seek out in Superlative are those that have uniquely and defiantly been spared from the flattening and homogenizing forces of globalization. These superlatives often recall a world that is dead except in the most obscure and traditional holdouts. At one of the community's oldest remaining chapels, I reflected on the various factors that must have conspired to shape the Udi into a superlative anomaly. They are the last surviving link to a forgotten kingdom and its lost language. They managed to preserve a distinct Christian identity within a now Muslim-majority country for over 1,700 years. And after centuries of quiet existence, they have a newfound and unintentional symbolic role in a modern geopolitical conflict. After a quiet, almost stubborn, refusal to fade away, the Udi are not just a historical footnote. They are a small community with a big enough story to be publicly resurrected.

Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, was once home to both of Christianity's earliest adopters — both Udi and Armenian. The last remaining sign of Azeri Armenians ever living here is St. Gregory the Illuminator's Church, a locked and unlabeled building that stands in a kind of dignified, somber resignation. This church, built in 1903, is the last remaining Armenian Apostolic church in the capital of now enemy Azerbaijan.

This monumental anachronism is a relic of a time when the lines on the map were far more porous, when the ethnic and religious makeup of cities like Baku, Yerevan, and Tbilisi had a complexity that now seems geopolitically unimaginable. With brutal efficiency, today's modern reality has "unmixed" the very populations that once built it. The Udi, being the last remnants of a now-extinct empire, persisted in Azerbaijan in a way that the Armenians, who now have a state of their own, could not.

The Caucasus capitals were not ethnic fortresses; they were open houses, shared spaces where different languages, faiths, and customs coexisted and intermingled with a casual intimacy that feels like a beautiful fiction today. The unmixing of these populations began with the rise of nationalism in the late Soviet period and peaked with the brutal war over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

The once-thriving Armenian community of Baku was entirely uprooted, its people either killed or forced to flee, leaving behind their homes, businesses, and places of worship. St. Gregory the Illuminator's Church is now the last of its kind, an architectural widower in a city that has lost its Armenian soul. Its presence, much like the Udi's continued existence, is a quiet refutation of the idea that Azeris and Armenians, or Muslims and Christians more generally, are destined to be in conflict — when there was a time, not so long ago, when they were all simply neighbors.

🕹️ Travel tip: If you're up for a true off-the-beaten-path journey, consider venturing about 5 hours from Azerbaijan's capital, to the Udi heartland. The drive to Nij and Oghuz is a scenic trip that takes you into a region known for its stunning natural beauty and rich cultural heritage. Don’t miss the seldom-visited Azerbaijan Udi Hearth, an ethnographic museum on the last people of one of the first Christian kingdoms.

Yerevan’s Circlar Park, like many post-Soviet urban parks, is a space of negotiated purpose. Mothers push strollers along its paved allées, old men play backgammon on worn benches, and teenagers gather in performative nonchalance. In one of the park’s quieter nooks, not far from the statue of the famed Armenian poet Yeghishe Charents, stand two slabs of stone. They are unassuming, easily missed if you are not looking for them. They do not dominate the skyline like Tsitsernakaberd, Armenia’s national monument to its genocide, which sits on a hill overlooking the city like a silent, wounded bird. These stone slabs are, instead, both missable but not to be missed.

This is the “To Live and Not Forget” memorial. The two basalt pillars lean toward each other as if in conversation, or perhaps for mutual support. On one pillar, an inscription in Armenian reads, “To the Memory of the Victims of the Genocides of the Armenian and Jewish Peoples.” On the other, the same is carved in Hebrew. In this fractious, weaponized world of comparative atrocity, this humble monument is, unfortunately, righteously radical.

I have never seen any memorial quite like this one in any of my travels. Memory of genocide is jealously guarded, fiercely politicized, and weaponized in the grim theatre of geopolitics, but this quiet corner in Yerevan proposes a different grammar of grief. It suggests that suffering need not be a zero-sum game, that the acknowledgment of one people’s greatest tragedy does not diminish another’s. This rare yet elemental empathy is all the more remarkable because it exists here, in Armenia, a nation whose own foundational trauma remains a pawn in the cynical chess of international relations, most notably not formally recognized by the State of Israel.

For decades, Israel has engaged in a painful diplomatic ballet, refusing to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide. The reasons are not historical but brutally geopolitical. For years, the primary obstacle was the strategic alliance with Turkey, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, which has spent a century and a vast fortune on a campaign of denialism. More recently, Israel’s relationship with Azerbaijan drives the reluctance. Israel sells natural gas-rich Baku billions of dollars in advanced weaponry — drones, missiles, and surveillance systems — which Azerbaijan deployed against Armenia in their war over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Azerbaijan provides Israel with a significant portion of its oil and, crucially, a strategic perch on the border of Iran.

Put coldly but simply: the memory of 1.5 million dead Armenians a century ago is a lesser currency than lucrative trade and a check on the Islamic Republic. When Israel’s Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, casually tweeted the phrase “the Armenian genocide” in a diplomatic spat with Turkey after October 7, it felt less like a genuine acknowledgment and more like a taunt, a reminder that recognition is a card to be played, not a truth to be honored.

Israel is a small country, with the highest existential stakes, and too beleaguered to afford to take moral stances that don’t serve its survival. The state’s nonrecognition does not represent what Israeli people believe to be true, and especially doesn’t represent how the few Armenian Jews relate to the founding tragedies of their modern nation. Morever, this politicization of memory is, of course, not unique to Israel. The United States held recognition hostage for over a century, driven by the strategic importance of Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base — only formally acknowledging the genocide in 2021. Great Britain still refuses, clinging to an archaic deference to its old Ottoman ally. In this global arena of competitive victimhood, where history is held captive by present-day realpolitik, this Yerevan memorial feels like a virtuous dissent.

Situated in this landscape of strategic denial, the memorial was the initiative of Yerevan’s small, resilient Jewish community, led by its long-time chairwoman, Rimma Varzhapetyan-Feller. Consecrated in 2006, it was intended as a place of shared mourning, a recognition of parallel darkness. Jews were among the earliest voices to denounce the Armenian genocide, most notably Henry Morgenthau, Sr., a German Jew and the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916. “I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this,” he wrote in a 1915 dispatch. He coined his own term for it, “race murder,” and relentlessly confronted Talat and Enver Pasha, the implacable leaders of the Ottoman regime.

Decades later, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, became obsessed with the question of how to legally prosecute what he called “the crime of barbarity.” As a student, he had asked his professor why the Ottoman leaders who massacred the Armenians could not be brought to justice. The professor replied that there was no law under which to try them; the concept of national sovereignty was absolute. Incensed, Lemkin began to develop a legal framework for a new kind of crime, one that targeted not just individuals but entire groups, drawing both from the Armenian and Jewish experience. In 1944, he finally gave it a name, fusing the Greek word genos (race, tribe) with the Latin suffix -cide (killing). He called it genocide. The very verbal tool we use to comprehend and condemn these ultimate crimes was, therefore, forced in direct response to the Armenian and Jewish tragedies. Lemkin saw them not as separate events, but as part of a terrifying and recurring human pattern.

In the archives of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, there is a special section honoring the “Righteous Among the Nations,” non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Among them are Armenians. These were not grand geopolitical acts, but small, dangerous gestures of human decency that radiate the same empathy now frozen in stone in Yerevan’s Circular Park. But Yerevan’s memorial is unique; unlike Yad Vashem and Tsitsernakaberd, it is not primarily about one genocide while secondarily honoring another. It honors both tragedies equally.

Time and again, this monument has been defiled not only by realpolitik, but also by vandalism. The first time, red paint was splashed across its surface. The second time, it was toppled, its stone slabs knocked from their foundation. The vandals accused Jews and the State of Israel of complicity in the recent ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh (or Artsakh, as the Armenians call it). The attacks were clumsy, brutish expressions of a complex and painful reality. They were the physical manifestation of the very political forces the monument was designed to transcend: the corrosion of memory and morality by the brutal calculus of statecraft.

The vandalism is, in its own perverse way, a testament to the memorial’s power. It was not attacked because it is irrelevant, but because it represents a bond that is deeply inconvenient to the current political order in the Caucasus. Armenian-Jewish solidarity complicates the narrative around Azerbaijan’s strategic partnership with Israel; frustrated by Israel’s arms sales and the state’s refusal of genocide recognition, the monument can seem like a naive symbol of one-sided friendship.

As I left the park, I reflected on how our memory must serve the present. We must defy any transactional relationship with the past that results in beliefs that drone sales are worth prioritizing over historical truths, or that any symbol of kinship wtih the Jewish people is a lie. The monument — commissioned by the Jewish Community of Armenia, with support from American heritage groups and local authorities — is a product of civil society, not statecraft. It speaks a language that predates the modern nation-state and its cynical and transactional alliances — the language of people who know what it is to be marked for annihilation, to be driven from their homes, to see their culture torn up by the roots.

In the end, the “To Live and Not Forget” monument is more than a memorial; it is an argument that empathy is not a finite resource. It argues that we can, and must, remember the suffering of others even as we tend to our own wounds. In a world that constantly asks us to choose a side, to rank tragedies, and to turn memory into a weapon, these two simple slabs of stone in a Yerevan park speak a radical truth, which, like the stone from which it is carved, endures.

🕹️ Travel tip: Combine your visit to the Holocaust Memorial with a trip to Yerevan's Cascade, a prominent city landmark offering excellent views. Separately, while at the Armenian Genocide Memorial (Tsitsernakaberd), look for the plaque from the Jewish Community of Armenia. Tucked away among the trees dedicated to the victims, its presence offers a glimpse into the historical kinship between Armenians and Yerevan’s small Jewish community.

Few pivots in human history changed our species in ways so transformative there's no going back: the Agricultural Revolution in Mesopotamia, the Renaissance in Florence, the Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley. These reconfiguring shifts aren't mere cultural or technological changes; they're upheavals in what it means to be human. Among these species-altering realignments is the Industrial Revolution — born in Manchester, the United Kingdom’s second, and often overshadowed, city.

Before the Industrial Revolution, the world largely lived by the land. Feudal hierarchies meant power came from cultivating, extracting, and conquering territory. But Manchester, the world's first truly industrial city, changed all that. It shifted the path to prosperity from land to the factory floor.

Here, the very first factories and assembly lines didn't just transform capitalism; they created a new kind of capitalism — one driven by production, not just acquisition. This was more than an economic shift; it was a revolution in how humans organized themselves. Manchester forged a new social order: industrial barons rose to power through what they produced, not their birthright or conquests. And factory workers became an entirely new class, the industrial proletariat.

Walking along the Bridgewater Canal, the city's oldest, I was struck by how Manchester's humble, almost gritty, exterior conceals its profound legacy. It's the undeniable birthplace of modern society.

Manchester’s legacy is dichotomous, birthing both the grandest dreams and the deepest despair. In 1904, at Manchester’s Midland Hotel, Mr. Charles Rolls and Mr. Henry Royce invented the luxury car that came to embody capitalist dreams and excess. Yet, in the next neighborhood over, the most famous (and some might say infamous) philosophical revolt against the very greed Rolls-Royces represented was penned at Chetham's Library by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto.

Manchester was implicated in these tortured dichotomies, where the pettiest poor and most rigged rich coexisted and clashed. Profit inevitably entailed social, economic, and even environmental expense. The world’s first industrial city brought us modern manufacturing, inaugurated by cotton gins fed by enslaved people in the southern United States. The more voracious the spinning jennies, on display at Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum, the more vicious the subjection.

I thought about how cotton, which clothed the world, was, in its time, as revolutionary as the silicon connecting us today. Larger artifacts at the museum include historic locomotives, once the iron lungs of a city that pulsed with progress. The oldest among them, "Planet," could reach 30 miles per hour, a bullet train in 1830s terms. The museum isn’t just about such machines, but the audacious ideas that birthed them: the core notion that humankind could bend nature to its will.

The Science and Industry Museum is a monument to many superlatives. The building itself, once Liverpool Road Station, was the world’s first inter-city railway station. This terminus saw the first trains powered by timetabled steam locomotives between Manchester’s mills and Liverpool’s port. The museum honors many other Manchester firsts: the city where cycling first became popular as a mode of transit and sport (Manchester still hosts the headquarters of the Great Britain cycling team and the world’s busiest velodrome); the first newspaper, The Manchester Guardian, to be printed on a modern Linotype line casting machine; the first commercially available electronic microscope, produced by engineers at Metropolitan Vickers in 1936; the first stored-program computer, "Baby" (the precursor to the modern circuit board), invented at the University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Geoff Tootill; and even the first modern sewage system, built after the 1792 Police Act funded public wastewater collection and treatment.

The very act of flushing a toilet, a mundane routine today, was once a radical act of public health that originated in Manchester. The city rewrote the human story in even more fundamental ways by changing our relationship with time. When the biological clock first succumbed to the far less personal factory clock, time quite literally became money. This relentless march of the factory clock later gave rise to the formal concept of “time off,” first introduced in Manchester in 1847 with the Ten Hours Act.

Manchester saw the first modern labor laws, softening the rabid pangs of rapid progress. In 1833, the Factory Act made it illegal for anyone under age 9 to work in textile factories, and children aged 9-13 were limited to nine hours per day. Soon after, Manchester pioneered protections that contributed to later developments like workers’ compensation and employer liability, though these specific acts weren't fully realized until much later (e.g., the Workmen's Compensation Act in 1897 in the UK). Economic hierarchies from the factory floor mirrored political power structures until the Secret Ballot Act of 1872, which allowed people to vote in secret for the first time. Previously, voting was a privilege only for some middle-class men (as of the 1832 Reform Act), and before that, only the Industrial Revolution’s privileged few men. Women over 30 gained the right to vote in 1918 (Representation of the People Act), with all women over 21 gaining suffrage in 1928 (Equal Franchise Act).

At the People’s Museum, a monument to the dark sides of the progress celebrated at the Museum of Science and Industry, I learned that Manchester was the birthplace of Chartism, the world’s first working-class movement. Named after their "charter" — a list of six demands for political reform — these early activists laid the groundwork for future social justice movements. What struck me was that these movements, honored at the People’s Museum, saw themselves as patriotic and industrial barons as subversive. The 1821 banner of the oldest surviving trade union in the world, the Liverpool Tinpale Workers, proudly pictured the Union Jack and celebrated King George IV’s coronation. Most trade unions later went on to support the First World War and even banned strikes. After all, if industrial barons were economic fascists, then Axis powers were their wrongful political cousins.

Manchester originated the stark dualities of our modern existence: capitalism’s excesses, including luxury automobiles, alongside impassioned pleas for equality; thundering locomotives alongside the silent hum of the first computers; slavery and industrial exploitation alongside the first worker’s protections and unions; "time is money" alongside "time off"; and the glory of the Industrial Revolution alongside its various miseries.

I ended my day in Castlefield, Manchester’s first industrial hub, transitioning back into the present day. What is today’s equivalent of Manchester’s shockwave to the human experience? What is the AI-era equivalent of mass production making goods cheaper and more available? Of societies shifting from subsistence economies to consumer-driven ones? Of advertising becoming an ambient force? Of the industrial working class and a managerial middle class disrupting the prior aristocratic order? Of new forms of inequality fueling political movements demanding reform? Of steamships, railways, and the telegraph shrinking distances and linking far-flung economies? Of new coal-powered machinery belching smoke into the sky and pollutants into rivers, generating the modern environmental crisis? Of work shifting from the home to the factory, upending traditional family dynamics? Of urbanization surging — with only 17 percent of England’s population living in urban areas in 1801, but 72 percent by 1891?

As I stepped back into the Manchester drizzle, I carried with me not just the knowledge of what was, but a renewed sense of the audacity to revolutionize what might be. Today, as our world enters the AI era, Manchester reminds me of the sheer scale of transformation about to unfold. Walking around Castlefield Park, the terminus for the world’s first passenger railway, I pondered how sentient machines are reshaping economies and societies as radically as the factories that mechanized production during the Industrial Revolution.

🕹 Travel tip: Manchester’s landmarks tell the story of how the Industrial Revolution began. Castlefield, the site of the Bridgewater Canal, is the world’s first true industrial canal. Ancoats, known as the first industrial suburb, was packed with the textile mills that pioneered factory-based production. The Royal Exchange, once the epicenter of the global cotton trade, was where merchants accelerated the paradigm of profit through invention. No visit is complete without a stop at the The People’s History Museum – a tribute to the new working class, unions, and the social movements that arose in response to industrialization’s challenges.

The Divis Tower of Belfast rises over Falls Road, bearing unhealed scars from troubled times. From this residential tower, once a former battleground, I would be guided by two men who fought on opposite sides of Northern Ireland’s 30-year conflict, known as the Troubles — a violent struggle that lasted from the late 1960s until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. One guide, a former volunteer for the Irish Republican Army (IRA) — a political and terrorist organization that used violence to pursue the unification of Ireland and end British rule in Northern Ireland — would lead me through his own embattled West Belfast. The other, an Ulster Protestant who fought to keep Northern Ireland part of the United Kingdom, would guide me through his adjacent neighborhood. Their stories were not just accounts of past “Troubles”; the scars remain in unforgiving murals, pained memorials, and reinforced walls that make Belfast, quite literally, the largest physically divided city in the Western world.

The ex-IRA guide set the tone: this dual narrative, he said, was “a story that ends better, but doesn’t end well.” He added, “Bullets don’t just travel through distance; they travel through time.” Gates that once stayed open until midnight between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods now close at 7 p.m. There are two police stations, two libraries, and two segregated schools—all within blocks of each other, each serving its respective divided community. The walls have grown higher since the Troubles—three times higher, in fact. With little real integration, another generation is growing up in a tormented time warp.

The walls themselves have a hauntingly ironic name: “peace walls.” More than 100 such barriers exist, and they stretch for miles, separating Catholic nationalist and Protestant loyalist communities. These walls did not exist before 1969, the year the Troubles erupted. But the conflict rewrote Belfast’s landscape, carving out physical and psychological divides that seem as impenetrable today as they did decades ago.

The ex-IRA guide’s story began at Divis Tower. This 1960s apartment building became a frontline during the Troubles, when British soldiers took over its top floors to surveil the IRA below. Today, the British soldiers are gone, but the scars of what my guide called an “occupation” remain. “Occupation,” or perceived occupation, depending on who you ask, is a connection that links Irish nationalists to the Palestinian cause. At Divis Tower and the surrounding neighborhood, I saw more Palestinian flags than Irish ones, signaling a visceral solidarity that transcends geography. For these Irish Catholics, continued British rule is a last vestige of colonization — the same force that once stripped them of their culture (England’s Queen Elizabeth I ordered all harps, now a symbol of Ireland, to be destroyed on punishment of death), language (indigenous Gaelic was nearly eradicated by enforced English), and worst of all, dignity.

The parallels to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories resonated deeply for my ex-IRA guide. In the aftermath of the October 7 War, the flags, murals, and memorials became even more numerous. This solidarity is not merely symbolic: during the Troubles, the IRA trained with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), seeing their struggle as a mirror of their own fight for self-determination in what they considered a colonized land.

As we crossed the gate separating Falls Road from Shankill Road, we entered Protestant loyalist territory. Here, the Union Jack flies proudly, and murals of British soldiers and loyalist paramilitaries cover the walls. My Protestant guide took over, as my ex-IRA guide turned back. He was unwelcome here: The IRA was responsible for the deaths of over 1,800 people, including approximately 600 civilians, during the Troubles.

“The root of all conflicts is dehumanization,” the loyalist guide began. He asked how it could be that the same Protestant and Irish Catholic soldiers who fought together in the First and Second World Wars turned their weapons on each other only 20 years later. He teared up at a mural depicting the Battle of the Somme, a battle in which Irish Catholic and Protestant soldiers honorably served together in the British Army during World War I, shaking his head in disbelief.

“We were fixated on who was first-class and who was second-class citizens. But we were all third-class citizens and didn’t realize it.” And still today, all sides are losing. Institutionalized separation means the next generation is growing up with the same entrenched identities, the same “us” or “them” existence. Indeed, the status quo is better than the previous “us” versus “them” conflict, but the absence of bullets doesn’t mean the presence of peace. In Belfast, the conflict has outlived its combatants, entrenched in walls of concrete and fear. In this doom loop, the past refuses to release its grip on the present.

For my loyalist guide, the chief grievance is that Sinn Féin, once the political wing of the IRA, is now the largest political party in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Many of the party’s leaders are former IRA members who once took up arms in a violent struggle against British rule. Their rise to legitimate political power signals both progress and unresolved tensions. To the loyalist guide, what may appear as reconciliation feels like a bitter pill to swallow. Neither forgiven nor forgotten on their side of the “peace wall,” their anger toward Sinn Féin remains, channeled into murals and memorials rather than munitions.

Nearly three decades have passed since the Good Friday Agreement officially ended the Troubles. But my tour made it painfully clear that while the active conflict may be over, nearly everything that caused it remains. The walls are higher, the gates close earlier, and the community remains as divided as ever. The past’s scars leave the present wounded, albeit no longer actively bleeding. Both guides agreed: the decades-long ceasefire is an extraordinary achievement, but it has become a crutch to avoid resolving the tinder box of pain. Peace, as it turns out, is more than just the absence of war.

🕹 Travel tip: There's no rawer way to understand, and even feel, the Troubles than the "Conflicting Stories" walking tour. Led by guides from both sides of the “peace wall,” a Protestant Loyalist and Catholic ex-IRA freedom fighter / terrorist (depending on who you ask), the tour offers unparalleled intimacy, nuance, and candor that will make your head spin and heart ache.  

In Kakheti, the heart of Georgia's winemaking region, viniculture is more than a profession — it is a lineage that stretches back 8,000 years. This isn’t just an archaeological theory; it’s a living tradition. Georgians continue to harvest, ferment, and imbibe using techniques passed down from their ancestors, preserving an unbroken connection to the world’s first winemakers. The word "wine" itself is thought to have roots in the Georgian "gvino," which influenced the French "vin," Spanish "vino," and English "wine." Georgia, it seems, not only pioneered winemaking but also shaped the very language used to describe it.

I arrived in Kakheti during Gvinobistve, "the month of wine," just in time for Rtveli, the grape harvest festival. Rtveli is not merely an agricultural task but a communion with history, the land, and each other. Nothing is artificial, wasted, or changed from when humans first fermented grapes into wine. Unlike European winemakers, who typically ferment only the juice, Georgians use the entire grape — skins, seeds, and even stems. This approach adds tannins and minerals, natural preservatives that allow Georgian wine to last twice as long as its European counterparts.

Harvesting a Georgian family's vineyard during Rtveli, with everything — from seed to stem — destined for the qvevri, the traditional Georgian fermentation vessel. 

Once pressed, the grape liquids and solids incubate in hefty clay vessels called qvevri. These beeswax-lined giants, buried underground, act as fermentation chambers, producing wines that are earthy, vibrant, and often amber-hued, commonly known as "orange wine." The fermentation relies entirely on the wild yeast found on the grapes’ skins. Even to my untrained palate, the wine born from Rtveli had an otherworldly quality, its amber depths rich with notes of dried figs, peaches, and bitter orange peel.

The journey from vine to qvevri misses no opportunity to give winemaker hosts and their guests a hands-on stake in the tradition. Our Kakhetian hosts explained that when automation shortcuts human involvement, the longevity of traditions is at-risk. We handpicked the grapes, filled buckets many times over, transferred them to sacks, and finally brought them to the press — the last step before the qvevri. But first, our host climbed inside the qvevri and thoroughly scrubbed its interior with cherry bark, a natural antiseptic. Any modern efficiency that could imperil this sacred tradition is not welcomed. 

Amidst the vines, impromptu toasts celebrate the harvest and each other — a prelude to the supra, the elaborate Georgian feast, that follows the labor.

In the Georgian language, wine is not "made"; it is "born." It spends nine months fermenting, like a human life growing in the qvevri womb, and is spoken of as a living thing. To Georgians, wine is the literal lifeblood of history, community, and divinity, and plays a vital role in rituals far beyond Rtveli, including the Eucharist. Many homes in the countryside even have a dedicated room for this process — a marani — as common as a garage or pantry.

From the moment we snipped the first vine, the toasts began, led by the tamada, a Georgian toastmaster who guides the guests through a series of shared reflections. Though the tamada initiates the toasts, the process is democratic, with guests piling on their sentiments. The first toast — "May you always have wine, cheese, and bread to offer strangers when they arrive at your house" — set the tone. By night’s end, we would no longer be strangers, but bound together in the same timeless tradition.

The toasts flowed, celebrating friendship, love, and life’s simple pleasures. Each one was like a prayer, a rallying cry, or a collective release — offering a drunken catharsis akin to group therapy. With every toast came a thundering "Gaumarjos!" — Georgian for "to victory!" — a tribute to the survival of Georgia’s distinct cultural identity through centuries of Persian, Ottoman, and Russian rule.

The grapes are pressed; then the juice and sediment begins fermenting in human-sized subterranean qvevri, following a method unchanged for centuries.

Rtveli culminates in a supra — an hours-long feast where overflowing plates, hearts, and glasses come together. Our table groaned under the weight of khachapuri (cheese bread), khinkali (dumplings our hostess had taught us to fold), vibrant salads, and endless homemade wine. The toasts continued, weaving the voices of all present into the uninterrupted chain of 8,000 years of tradition that brought us to this moment. As the night deepened and inhibitions eased, I felt time collapsing: I was no longer just a guest, but a participant in a ritual as old as civilization itself.

From the vineyard to the supra, Rtveli is about continuity and community. Here in Georgia, wine is more than a beverage; it is a bridge to the past, to tradition, and to each other. The company of strangers isn’t incidental — it’s essential to why Georgian winemaking has endured through the ages. In the shared experience of Rtveli, I could feel, almost viscerally, the staying power of well-preserved tradition.

The supra table overflowed with traditional dishes and wine, accompanied by lively music, heartfelt toasts (gaumarjos!), and revelrous celebration.

🕹 Travel tip: From late August to early October, join EatThis! in the Kakheti region, where you'll work alongside local families to pick grapes destined for qvevri, the ancient clay vessels used for fermentation. After a day in the vineyards, Rtveli will culminate in traditional supra feast overflowing with regional specialties and, of course, the alcoholic fruits of your labor.

The quaint Georgian city of Gori is an unassuming birthplace for one of the 20th century's most powerful figures: Joseph Stalin. From this humble town, in an even humbler house, emerged a man who would come to dominate one-sixth of the world’s landmass, ruling an empire that spanned two continents and hundreds of millions of people. For over three decades — two years longer than Mao, and 17 more than Hitler — Stalin held indomitable power that irrevocably changed the course of history.

And it all began here, in the simple, almost straggly, childhood home of Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, later known as Joseph Stalin. It is hard to fathom that such an ordinary place could rear the man who would rise to lead the Soviet Union, an empire larger than any other in modern history.

Stalin's early life was far from what it later became. The museum’s artifacts — an old school notebook, a worn pair of shoes, photographs of a boy who, at first glance, appeared to be just another child — made it difficult to reconcile his youth in Gori with his gory rule that followed. Here, Stalin is portrayed as a man of the people, not as one who discarded people (some 20 million of them) with merciless indifference. 

The museum exhibits the chronology of Stalin’s rise and the extent of his reign over the 15 republics of the Soviet Union, from the icy reaches of Siberia to the shores of the Black Sea. Stalin’s portrayal is curiously selective, if not downright warped, evading almost any reference to the Great Terror, the political purge that left millions imprisoned, executed, or banished to the Gulags. The focus is squarely on Stalin’s personal life, military strategies, and political accomplishments, including rapid industrialization through sequential Five-Year Plans that transformed the Soviet Union into a superpower. Propaganda posters line the walls, depicting the now fallen empire that was once in the throes of “progress” — whether through the construction of colossal factories or the triumph of the Red Army in World War II.

This celebratory narrative jolted me with dissonance and with the deafening absence of the millions of lives lost during Stalin’s 29-year rule. The museum raises the question of how legacies are to be celebrated or reckoned with, and shines a light on the choices that we make in remembering history. Here, beside Stalin’s home, the choice is clear: a legacy of fame, rather than infamy, for Gori’s most famous son.

Outside the museum, Gori residents are more nuanced when asked about Stalin. "He was clearly a genius," many say, "but we wish he had used that genius for good." The museum makes that genius clear in a parade of Stalin’s personal belongings: his iconic felt hat, his favorite smoking pipe, and his meticulously preserved railway carriage used for traveling to high-stakes meetings with world leaders. These artifacts depict a leader who built relationships on the world stage to expand his influence, feeding into the Soviet psyche’s and the Cold War’s competitive dynamics. But only the use, and not the abuse, of his genius is on display. 

Leaving Gori, I found myself grappling with the enigma of how a child born in this once obscure backwater of the Russian Empire could leave such a monumental legacy. Gori is a humble town with an outsized role in history, seemingly unburdened by the complexities of its controversial legacy. The Stalin Museum itself flattens that complexity in its own way, rolling out a literal red carpet to a life-size marble statue of the autocrat at the entry. Yet, amidst its selective storytelling, the museum makes a decisive point: Power can emerge from the most unassuming places, and its roots can be as inconspicuous as a wooden house in a quiet Georgian town.

🕹️ Travel tip: Just a mile from the Stalin Museum, tucked away across the bridge and off the beaten path, lies a hidden gem called KE&RA. Don't miss this chance to savor authentic Georgian hospitality after your museum visit!

Giorgi, the owner, will welcome you with a glass of melon liquor and toasted hazelnuts. Dine in cozy couches nestled within a converted garage, befriend the resident cats, and sip homemade wine from Giorgi's qvevri, a traditional clay vessel used for making, aging, and storing Georgian wine. Born from a passion project during COVID, KE&RA exudes warmth and a home-away-from-home atmosphere.

The delicious menu features home-cooked dishes with vegetarian options served in an art gallery, lounge, restaurant, and rustic backyard, all rolled into one. The name itself, a play on words incorporating his children's initials, means a traditional Georgian hearth and evokes the essence of home, family, and the warmth.

I had thought the Byzantine Empire was bygone—a chapter in history that closed with the fall of Constantinople to the Muslim armies of the Ottoman Empire in 1453. But on Mount Athos, an autonomous monastic state in the cerulean Aegean Sea, time seems to have stopped a thousand years ago. This rugged peninsula, jutting out from the eastern coast of Greece, is home to over 2,000 residents—all Orthodox monks whose lives are a ceaseless prayer. No woman has legally set foot on the peninsula’s hallowed ground since the Virgin Mary herself—and that includes non-native female animals, with the exception of cats and chickens, valued for their mousing and egg-laying abilities, respectively. Nowhere is Christianity practiced as close to how it was during the time of Jesus Christ himself. 

Mount Athos may have embraced change less than anywhere else on Earth. As one of the rare non-Orthodox pilgrims to visit the monastic republic (and the only one at every monastery I visited), I repatterned my life to match that of this time capsule—where everyone, without exception, is on the same page in Byzantine history. The moment I collected my Athos visa, called a Diamonitirion, and boarded the ferry from the Greek town of Ouranoupoli, the last stop located in the 21st century, my spirit found solace in the holy peninsula’s rhythms of life. I felt beyond welcomed under the doting guidance of monks and veteran pilgrims, who never missed a chance to enrich me with context and describe what rituals meant to them—even as they bemoaned the fact that I’m not baptized.

Welcomed by the monks of Simonos Petras on my first night in Byzantium, I felt as if I had traveled back a millennium. Here, prayers echo with the promise of an afterlife, a timeless bridge between the past and the future.

On this peninsula with a centuries-long prohibition on women, every prayer is uttered in reverence of a woman: the Virgin Mary. Legend has it that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was sailing to Cyprus when a storm blew her ship off course and onto the shores of Athos. Enchanted by its serene beauty, verdant forests of chestnut and cypress trees, and crystal-blue waters, she prayed to God to make the peninsula her own garden, a sanctuary where she could find peace and solace. When her wish was granted, the peninsula was forever consecrated to her. From that point on, Athos became a haven for men seeking spiritual enlightenment, a place where the divine feminine is revered in the absence of the human feminine.

Mary is to be honored without distraction—the quicksand of prayer. The monks warned me that distractions come in various forms: food that is too tasty (Athos only serves simple fare better scarfed down than savored), people who are too seductive (women), and even friendships that are too close. The monks aren’t “friends”; they are “brothers.” Even during meals, they don’t converse but eat mechanically as the prayer continues. Never have I felt so present for the sake of something in the future: the afterlife.

This pin-pointed presentness is hard to recreate in today’s world. On Athos, the only visible signs of modernity are the occasional solar panel, satellite dish and motorized vehicle. The air is thick with the scent of incense, beeswax candles, and the salty sea breeze; the only sounds are the rhythmic chants of monks, the rustling of leaves, and the gentle lapping of waves against the shore. Yet, this archaic peace doesn’t mean the monks are disconnected from the world they have left behind. I had nuanced discussions with them on topics ranging from Donald Trump’s campaign to Elon Musk’s Hyperloop, social media content moderation, the perils of today’s multipolar world, “Grexit” (the movement for Greece to exit the EU rather than submit to bailouts), and just about everything in between.

I was surprised by how up-to-date the monks were, despite being deliberately and literally out-of-date. Mount Athos is the only place in the world that still keeps Byzantine time. For over 500 years, clock towers on the peninsula have been several hours off from the rest of Greece, with the day beginning at sunset, not at midnight. The monastic peninsula is the last place that follows the Julian calendar, which has been obsolete since 1582 and is thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar used by the rest of the world. The measurement, passage, and entire experience of time here are different, feeling both frozen and eternal. In the day-to-day, this alien rhythm meant that I was up for 4 a.m. vespers, hours of deep baritone chants that filled the church with hypnotic, centuries-old melodies.

Historically, preserving this unique existence would not have happened but for a long chain of carve-outs and exemptions granted by the empires that ruled modern-day Greece since Byzantium. When Athos fell under Ottoman rule, the sultans agreed to grant it a special status of self-governance. Later, when Greece gained independence from the Ottomans in the 19th century, Athos’s autonomy was enshrined in the Greek constitution. During World War II, the monks shrewdly avoided Nazi interference by securing special status and then benefiting from Hitler being too occupied with Russia to loot their historical treasures. More recently, the European Union, with its laws on gender equality, challenged Athos’s male-only policy, arguing it violates women’s rights. However, the Greek government came to Athos’s defense, even threatening to grant the peninsula full independence, similar to Vatican City, so that they could preserve the prohibition. The Holy Mountain stayed frozen following centuries of circumstantial and strategic sheltering.

The monasteries themselves are architectural marvels, and I was particularly taken by Simonos Petras, whose monks graciously housed me for my first night in Byzantium incarnate. This cliff-top monastery appears structurally impossible, emerging from a jagged peak overlooking the Aegean – a blue expanse serene that it proved capable of bringing down my resting heart rate. Other monasteries, like the sprawling Great Lavra—the oldest and largest on the peninsula—are complex compounds resembling small cities, with courtyards, gardens, and intricate networks of passageways. Inside, each glistens with mosaics and exquisite frescoes depicting scenes from the Bible and the lives of the saints painted by the monks themselves. 

The monks take their duty toward—and access to—the most “unadulterated” form of the Christian faith seriously. They spend countless hours poring over ancient manuscripts, some of which are carefully preserved originals from the Byzantine Empire, seeking ever more proximity to the divine. Yet beyond the uniform black robes, bushy beards, and strict adherence to their lives of ceaseless prayer, I found a surprising diversity among the monks. Father Lukas of Simonos Petras is a genetics PhD from the University of Cambridge who is proudly, and non-oxymoronically, both a former scientist and a present monk. To him, those two are not at odds. He explained that human beings have “tapped out” on evolution now that we’ve achieved full domination over nature. The only forward trajectory left for us as a species is a metamorphosis beyond the realm of science, into the “Kingdom of God.”

Father Jeremiah of Xenophontos welcomed me with curiosity and warmth in this authentic Texas twang. When he arrived on Athos for his three-year trial (joining the monastic order is tantamount to marriage and a lifelong commitment), he donned cowboy boots beneath his robe. Jeremiah might be the opposite of what I had in mind as a prototypical monk: he grew up Baptist, was in a rock band, and had a turbulent childhood. I met monks who were mechanical engineers, physicians, historians, computer programmers, and more before they left it all to mute the distractions of modern life. The monks hailed from all corners of the world — from Boston, to Beirut, to Bali — before coming to Athos to stay forever.

Glimpses of Xenophontos: where time slows, faith deepens, and beauty surrounds.

Most of the monks are not hermits but rather vibrant members of communities—mostly monasteries, but also sketes (essentially villages with separate houses) and hermitages. Some welcome visitors, offering complimentary room and board and immersion into their Spartan, self-sufficient existence, free from any dependency that could detract from their unwavering devotion to God. They rise before dawn, long before the crow of a rooster (or on Athos, the haunting howl of endemic wolves), when a single bell, their call to prayer, sounds. They grow their own food (in Xenophontos, I found a cornucopia of banana, plum, and lemon trees all beside the main church), fish in the surrounding waters, and even brew their own wine—which flows freely right from their morning breakfast.

The Holy Mountain is home to twenty sovereign monasteries—seventeen of which are Greek, with the remaining three representing the Bulgarian, Serbian, and Russian Orthodox traditions. Greek serves as the lingua franca among the monastic communities, which are governed by the Sacred Community, composed of representatives from each monastery. This communal governing body oversees the peninsula's affairs, ensuring that the monastic traditions are upheld and that the delicate balance between autonomy and unity is maintained. Each monastery, led by an abbot elected for life by the monks, exercises near total autonomy in its internal affairs. This ancient system has presided over modern matters, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, during which each monastery’s abbot took his own stance on the safety of mRNA vaccines, mitigating infection risk from incoming pilgrims, and establishing general protocols.

For me, even as a non-Orthodox pilgrim, Athos was a mystical realm. It was a journey into a world devoid of the inevitable distractions of modern life, with a singular focus not on the here and now, but on the back then and eternal. If there is one place on Earth where time truly stands still, it’s here. The Holy Mountain has a pacifying effect, making exiting a modern world that can feel weary, sometimes even tattered, feel like an embrace.

I am not an Orthodox Christian and did not experience Athos like one. But what I took away from the holy peninsula is universal: the power of singular focus and intention. The fathers taught me that when there is a void, humans will fill it. The body, they say, is a “vessel” that they fill to the brim with the Holy Spirit, crowding out any space for inevitable demonic distractions. When I act without intention in my life, I leave myself vulnerable to voids. Although not as destructive as the anti-Christ that the monks might fear, these voids can lead to fruitless meandering and avoidable blockages between my body and spirit.

Pilgrims arrive at the sacred shores of Mount Athos, disembarking at the port of Daphne.

The monks prompted me to ponder the ways distraction plays an amplified and unwarranted role in my life. They described the nature of God’s miracles as humble and the anti-Christ’s as impressive to the point of being seductive. I thought about the various traps I get seduced by, such as progressing professionally along trajectories that appeal to me because externally they woo and are bejeweled. Obviously, for me, the answer is not joining a monastic order and opting out of the world, but to operate in that context as they do in theirs: with modesty and intention.

🕹 Travel tips: To visit Mount Athos, one must obtain a special permit, known as a Diamonitirion, which is only granted men. The visa can be requested by email at athosreservation@gmail.com up to 3 months before the date of pilgrimage.  Once granted, reservations must then be made at the monasteries themselves (instructions here). The journey to the peninsula is not easy, requiring a boat ride from the mainland and a sometimes arduous trek up steep mountain paths. But for those who make the pilgrimage, the spiritual rewards and jaw-dropping scenery are unforgettable.

In an unassuming office building on Pravda Street in downtown Moscow, I found a time capsule of the bygone Soviet Union. The Pravda newsroom, once the mouthpiece of the fallen empire, boasted the world's largest newspaper circulation. Today, the paper is a relic, yet an enduring symbol of an ideology that outlasted the political structure in which it was incubated.

Stepping into the Pravda newsroom is the closest I’ve felt to time travel. The office is old and stale, with a lingering scent of cigarette smoke that seems etched into the very fabric of the building. Dusty busts of Soviet figures – Marx, Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky – greeted me from every corner. Worn photographs, old clocks, and wood paneling adorn the walls. The archives, with their endless rows of decaying journals, reminded me of outdated school libraries. It was hard to imagine that this was one of the most influential news powerhouses in the world.

Pravda's origins date back to 1905, when it was established as a journal centered on arts, literature, and social affairs. A dramatic shift occurred during the Russian Revolution as Pravda aligned itself with the far-left Bolsheviks. In 1908, Leon Trotsky, who would go on to lead the Red Army, took over the editorial helm. Under Bolshevik leadership, Pravda focused on economic issues, workers' movements, strikes, and proletarian poetry.

During World War I, tsarist authorities cracked down on opposition, and Pravda was shut down. However, the paper continued to publish clandestinely, changing its name several times to evade censorship. After the 1917 Revolution that saw the Bolsheviks overthrow the imperial government, Pravda resurfaced as the official voice of the Soviet Communist Party. Joseph Stalin joined the editorial board after returning from Siberian exile.

Pravda enjoyed privileged political status and became the largest circulated newspaper during World War II, with a readership of 3 million. The Soviet news landscape centered on Pravda, representing the Communist Party's "truth," and Izvestia, the official government "news." Ironically, jokes circulated among the Soviet citizens that "there was no truth in Izvestia, and no news in Pravda." Still, Pravda offered insights into the enigmatic Soviet stance on global affairs and the inner workings of the Kremlin.

In 1996, after the fall of the Soviet Union, President Boris Yeltsin sold the vestiges of the vast Pravda empire to a Greek business family. Journalists who disagreed with working under foreign private ownership split and established a parallel Pravda. Later, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation acquired this version of Pravda, restoring its original identity within a vastly changed Russia. Meanwhile, Pravda Online (pravda.ru) remained as a privately-owned entity. A Russian arbitration court eventually granted both versions of Pravda – Communist Party-owned and privately-owned – the right to use the historic name.

Despite its diminished stature, Pravda retains its political ties with editors who serve as members of the Russian Parliament (Duma). The Communist Party, once the only in power, is now a minority party in the modern Russian Federation. The newsroom stands as a relic embodying a persistent ideology that continues to manifest in different forms in countries like Cuba and North Korea. Pravda’s existence highlights how ideologies can remain even when the formal political structures that support them are no longer.

🕹 Travel tip: While visiting Pravda's headquarters in Moscow is not a standard tourist activity, it is worth an attempt. Contact the editorial staff in advance via social media or the newspaper's website. Express your interest in learning about Pravda's historical significance, its current role in Russia, and the staff's perspective on its place in modern-day society.

The only major title eluding Baikal is the largest surface area, a distinction claimed by the Caspian Sea. Located in an isolated corner near Siberia, Russia's border with China and Mongolia, this remote lake is home to geological, biological, and human curiosities found nowhere else on Earth.

The Deepest, Most Voluminous, Oldest, and Clearest

Situated in an actively spreading rift, widening 2 centimeters per year, Baikal spans an impressive 636 kilometers (395 miles) in length and stretches 79 kilometers (49 miles) at its widest point. Surpassing Lake Superior fourfold in depth, Baikal holds the titles of the world's deepest lake by surface area, volume, and depth. Its mighty storms conjure waves up to 5 meters (16 feet), reminiscent of the most turbulent ocean shorelines.

Baikal's unparalleled depth contains over a fifth of Earth's freshwater, exceeding the combined volume of all America's Great Lakes. Fed by approximately 330 rivers, Baikal's single outlet, the Angara River, releases a staggering 23,000 cubic kilometers of freshwater—enough to sustain humanity for nearly 4,000 years. Baikal's ancient origins place it among a select group of paleo lakes, existing for tens of millions of years. Unlike glacial lakes formed during the Ice Age, these enduring features define Earth's landscape.

Baikal may also claim the title of the world's clearest major lake, with remarkable water transparency up to 130 feet deep. During winter, frozen mid-splash water traps bubbles within the ice, creating a mesmerizing spectacle. This pristine clarity is owed to goupki, a green sponge-like organism with an impressive ability to filter water, as a mere two square centimeters of goupki's calcium skeleton can filter 20 liters of water daily, effectively removing organic residue.

Beyond the Depths: Baikal's Biodiversity

Despite Siberia's harsh climate, with bone-chilling winter temperatures plunging to -50 degrees Celsius (-58 Fahrenheit), Lake Baikal thrives as a haven for an astounding array of life. Home to over 2,500 endemic species of plants and animals, with more than 1,000 found exclusively within its waters, Baikal holds an unparalleled biodiversity. Among its remarkable inhabitants is the Baikal Seal, or nerpa, one of only three entirely freshwater seal populations globally.

The lake also boasts a menagerie of extraordinary fish, including the comephorus, known as the Baikal oilfish. The comephorus' translucent bodies, predominantly composed of fat, seemingly melt into oil when exposed to sunlight. Baikal's allure extends beyond its known residents, as locals share tales of enigmatic creatures, some deemed monstrous, adding an air of intrigue to this remote corner of the world.

Survival in the Frozen Playground

The distinctive geography and biology of Baikal have also profoundly shaped the lives of the 100,000 people residing along its shores, mainly in scattered and isolated villages. This population comprises both ethnic Russians and indigenous Buryats, with roots tracing back to Mongolia. Over the centuries, the Buryats endured persecution from the Russian Orthodox Church but have since revitalized their Buddhist monasteries, embracing their unique spiritual heritage. Baikal's presence looms large in their religious practices, which center around the shamanistic ritual of offering money, cigarettes, and vodka to Burkhan, the god of the lake. For the Buryats, their identity is deeply intertwined with Siberia, as the rhythm of their lives is guided not by country borders but by the timeless influence of Baikal.

Baikal endures some of the coldest temperatures on Earth during the winter months, presenting a challenging environment for its residents. Despite limited access to electricity, locals have shown remarkable resourcefulness in transforming these harsh conditions into opportunities for convenience. When the lake freezes over for half the year, the ice thickens to over 2 meters (6.6 feet), becoming a robust surface capable of supporting vehicles weighing up to 15 tons, greatly enhancing mobility and connectivity. However, the summer season brings its own challenges, as the melting ice renders the lake impassable, requiring detours of several hundred kilometers for those seeking to navigate its vast expanse. Notably, there are no major roads connecting the northernmost settlement on Baikal's shores, Severobaykalsk, to Irkutsk, the largest city in the southern region of the lake.

In the harsh grip of winter, Lake Baikal becomes a battleground for survival and a playground for leisure. Traditional ice fishing sustains local communities as nets are cast through holes in the ice. Seals emerge from the holes to bask in the sun, serving as a source of nourishment, with hunting restricted to authorized individuals. Winter offers unique leisure activities on the ice, such as enjoying picnics on drifting pieces of broken-off ice at the convergence of Baikal and the Angara River. The icy landscape also invites frequent visits to banyas, traditional Russian saunas adorned with bear skin rugs and other quintessential symbols of the Russian wilderness. In Baikal, many banyas utilize steaming water sourced from volcanic activity in the Earth's crust, which is relatively thinner here compared to most other regions.

Lake Baikal stands as a geological marvel and a testament to human resilience. Its vast scale sets records across multiple geological aspects, while its harsh climate supports a unique ecosystem of enigmatic plants and animals. Despite its harsh winters that push the boundaries of human survival, Baikal also provides sustenance, freshwater, and even becomes a pathway of mobility on its frozen surface.

🕹️ Travel tip: Embrace the enchantment of Lake Baikal by ice skating, dog sledding, or simply walking on the frozen lake's surface. Plan the perfect Siberian afternoon by arranging a picnic lunch on a broken-off piece of Baikal ice, and then warm up at a traditional banya (sauna). To experience local Buryat culture, visit the sacred Shaman Rock on Olkhon Island, the largest island on the lake.