Greater Caucasus Greater Caucasus Greater Caucasus (, Бөјүк Гафгаз, بيوک قافقاز; , "Didi K’avk’asioni"; , "Bolshoy Kavkaz", sometimes translated as "Caucasus Major", "Big Caucasus" or "Large Caucasus") is the major mountain range of the Caucasus Mountains. The range stretches for about from west-northwest to east-southeast, between the Taman Peninsula of the Black Sea to the Absheron Peninsula of the Caspian Sea: from the Western Caucasus in the vicinity of Sochi on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea and reaching nearly to Baku on the Caspian. The range is traditionally separated into three parts: In the wetter Western Caucasus, the mountains are
Caspian Sea Turkic languages refer to the lake as "Khazar Sea". In Turkmen, the name is , in Azeri, it is , and in modern Turkish, it is . In all these cases, the second word simply means "sea", and the first word refers to the historical Khazars who had a large empire based to the north of the Caspian Sea between the 7th and 10th centuries. An exception is Kazakh, where it is called , "Kaspiy teñizi" (Caspian Sea). Renaissance European maps labelled it as "Abbacuch Sea" (Oronce Fine's 1531 world map), "Mar de Bachu" (Ortellius' 1570 map), or "Mar de