Per Auto Door Den Kaukasus Naar Perzië: De Aarde En Haar Volken, 1907

In 1907, a party of adventurers set out from Romania in automobiles, those noisy, unreliable machines that represented the absolute cutting edge of technology, to cross the Caucasus mountains and reach Persia. Among them: a prince, two young women, and a Swiss writer named Claude Anet who would transform this madcap expedition into a masterpiece of travel literature. What unfolds is a journey through worlds on the brink of vanishing. They traverse Bessarabia's endless plains, the Crimea's haunted landscapes, and the forbidding mountain passes of the Caucasus, every mile demanding improvisation, every sunrise revealing a civilization that has endured for millennia. The roads are barely roads. The weather turns vicious without warning. The cars break down endlessly. Yet somehow, between the mechanical failures and the frozen nights, Anet captures something essential: what it means to arrive somewhere as a stranger, to move through landscapes that have seen empires rise and fall while you struggle with a carburetor in the rain. This is travel writing before tourism, before guidebooks, before the world shrunk small.