The passage from the laid-back atmosphere in Abkhazia to the thriving and animate Russian district of Krasnodar is quite sudden. Even from the frontier point one can see the district is jam-packed: shops glued one to another, crammed cars in endless traffic jams and ongoing massive works on the infrastructure. As usual, the ubiquitous police forces keep a close watch over everything and anything. Hardly did we reach Adler when we saw on the left a huge billboard announcing extensive works to set up one of the many facilities where the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games (OG) will take place.

The narrow road winding up between the mountains and the sea cannot take in the army of tourists that keeps flooding in. Officially, in the Sochi region alone, about four and a half million tourists visit the Black Sea coast. The coast stretches along 300 kilometers north to Anapa and is strewn with tourist resorts which leads to traffic jams whatever the day, hour and weather may be. Vladimir Putin has promised the International Olympic Committee Russia would set aside 12 billion dollars for the infrastructure in order to ensure a proper development of the Olympic Games. However, Russian opposition politicians, among whom also a former prime-minister, claim the money is wasted on games which will turn out to be a disaster because of corruption, organized crime and lack of snow.

In the end of one hundred years of war period, Circassia region of the Caucasus was invaded and colonized by Russian Empire in 1864.  During that period of time the inhabitants of the West Caucasus, more than one million five hundred thousand Circassians (Adige, Abkhaz and Wubikh people), were forced to leave their land in famine after all their villages and fields were burned and destroyed. They were exiled from their land to Ottoman Empire under inhumane conditions.

Sochi region, where the 2014 Winter Olympics will be held, was the center that the parliament of independent and free Circassia was gathering until 1864. After the Russian invasion it was not only the Circassians removed from their land but also all their cultural heritage and even their graves were completely destroyed brutally. Today in the state museums of Sochi there is nothing displayed related to Circassians, the autochthonous people of that land for thousands of years. The real ancient history of Sochi extends to Anatolian Hattis, famous Troy, Meot and Sind Empires is almost forgotten. The Russian written history of Sochi begins in 1830 with the victories bombardment of Russian Tsar Navy landing soldiers to the Socha village which was destroyed and renamed by Russians as Navagiski fortified territory. In the museums of Sochi you can only see the pictures of poor Russian mujicks who were brought from inner Russia then forced to settle to Circassia after the Circassian Exile and also the Cossacks who even appropriating the national clothes of the exiled inhabitants shamelessly.