Legend tells that the twin summits of Elbrus, a 5,642-meter (18,510-foot) colossus at the Russian-Georgian border, are the cleaved skull of an ancient giant.

Elbrus, the tale goes, was attacked by his son Mount Beshtau in an argument over a local beauty, Mount Mashuk. Her tears now form one of southern Russia’s most celebrated mineral springs.

The exotic story captures the real life complexity of the Caucasus — and the way fallings out here quickly turn bloody.

Today the world’s focus is on Russia’s attack against Georgia in response to a Georgian assault on a separatist enclave of ethnic-Ossetians.

But the Ossetians are just one of more than 50 tiny ethnic groups in this beautiful region, each speaking a separate language, each fiercely protective of ancestral lands.

“The Caucasus has the typical complications of a mountain region, where people from different ethnicities live in isolation from each other,” says Alexander Cherkasov, an expert on the region with the Memorial human rights group.

The amazing ethnic patchwork of Papua New Guinea and the clan system of highland Scotland bear similarities, Cherkasov points out.

Add the post-Soviet legacy of corruption, brutality, and floods of weaponry, and you have the Caucasus.

Other than the fighting over South Ossetia in Georgia, there are bloody conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Georgian separatist province of Abkhazia, and the quagmire of Chechnya, where an estimated 100,000 people have lost their lives in a failed independence bid from Russia.

And yet Caucasian peoples are often able to live in harmony.

Despite today’s horrors, many Georgians and Ossetians are related through marriage. In Abkhazia, where thousands have died since the 1990s, the ethnic-Abkhaz separatist leader himself is married to a Georgian.

Even Dagestan, a remarkable district on the Russian side of the mountains, with more than 30 distinct ethnic groups, has little history of inter-communal fighting.

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