Gunib

Gunib is a mountain village in central Dagestan, in southern Russia, set on the slopes below a high, flat-topped mountain whose sheer cliffs make it a natural fortress. The plateau above, with its meadows and birch woods, can be reached only by a few steep paths, and the village looks out over the deep valleys of the Karakoysu river and the ridges of the eastern Caucasus. Its people, like most in this part of Dagestan, are Avars.

Gunib is remembered as the place where the long Caucasus War came to an end. Imam Shamil, an Avar religious and military leader, had led the resistance of the mountain peoples of Dagestan and Chechnya against the Russian empire for a quarter of a century. In 1859, after the fall of his stronghold at Vedeno, he retreated with a few hundred followers to the plateau of Gunib, where Russian forces under Prince Alexander Baryatinsky surrounded him. On 25 August 1859, by the Russian calendar of the day, Shamil surrendered.

A stone pavilion now marks the place, near the upper village, where Baryatinsky is said to have received him. Shamil was taken to Russia and lived in honourable exile, and he died in Medina in 1871 while on pilgrimage. He remains a figure of great importance in Dagestan, remembered and debated in different ways by its peoples and by Russians. Today the plateau is visited for its history and its views, and its paths lead through the ruins of the Russian fortress built after the war.