Kars - The Back Seat

Mavi Boncuk |

Kars - The Back Seat by John Barham

Whilst French and British eyes had been firmly fixed on the defences of Sevastapol, the situation in Asia Minor had been steadily deteriorating.

Asia Minor is arguably one of the worst defined regions in world geography - a nebulous area where the popular conception is that the girls all wear bright multi-coloured long dresses and headscarves and weave equally bright multicoloured carpets whilst the men, all looking about 140 years old, sit in the sun on decrepid wooden chairs wearing little woolly waistcoats and skullcaps and smoking hookahs. But as to where it actually is...

It seems that the allies during the Crimean War suffered from much the same attitude - Asia Minor was so remote that any military goings on there were too trifling to worry about. It was an attitude which at the end of the War was going to cost them dear at the conference table. And many believed that it was more by luck than good judgement that it didn't cost them the War itself.

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