Southern Caucasus in Perspective. The Scholarly Debate through the Pages of Seminarium Kondakovianum and Skythika (1927-1938)

In the interwar period more than ever, humanities were strongly affected by the political and social environment: art history and archaeology so played a central role in the construction and reinforcement of national identities. This is true even for a “peripheral” region such as the Caucasus, that in those years became an imaginary theatre of conflict for patriotic claims (the Georgian Georgij Čubinašvili against the Austrian Josef Strzygowski, the Polish Stefan Przeworski against the German Gustaf Kossinna) and nostalgia for the ancien régime (the Russian émigré Michail Rostovtzeff). Through a historiographical analysis of the articles published on Seminarium Kondakovianum and its series Skytika, the article seeks to understand the pioneering role this journal had in discovering a region almost completely neglected in Western literature, and how the Caucasus was perceived in the scholarly debate of the 1920s and 1930s.