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
Black Sea turquoise), Middle Persian / ("blue"), and New Persian ("blue"), as well as Ossetic (“dark gray"). The ancient Greeks, most likely those living to the north of the Black Sea, subsequently adopted the name and altered it to . Thereafter, Greek tradition refers to the Black Sea as the "Inhospitable Sea", , which is first attested in Pindar (). The name was considered to be "ominous" and was later changed into the euphemistic name "Hospitable sea", , which was also for the first time attested in Pindar. This became the commonly used designation for the sea in Greek. In contexts related