About the Cover

An email from an early reader asked about the dervish on the cover. Yes, the character could easily be a Persian or any one of many Turko-nomadic people inhabiting the Middle East and central Asia. This is due to the fact that trade and travel were highly developed and frequent among those regions for many centuries. But, according to the illustrator who drew this picture, he was depicting a Siberian Bashkir. Most of the modern-day Bashkirs live in the Republic of Bashkortostan (a.k.a. Bashkiria). Bashkirs are close ethnic and geographical neighbors of the Volga Bulgars (improperly named Tatars); Bashkirs and Tatars are the second-most-populous ethnic group in the Russian Federation. (The first is Russians, if you’re curious.)

The figure comes from an eighteenth-century illustration, “Gravure Homme Baschkir,” by Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur. Fascination with faraway lands and travel for pleasure were relatively new phenomena at the time, and collections of drawings such as this one were popular, introducing both the tourist as well as the armchair traveler to the inhabitants of other countries. The rich variety of drawings reminds us vividly of how culturally apart the world’s regions, towns, villages, and neighborhoods were just 200 years ago. Isolated from each other, people spoke different dialects and languages. In the streets or in the countryside, it was easy to identify where they lived and what their trade or station in life was, just by their dress.