A boy puts away his horse as the blue of night closes in on the village of Ushguli, below Mt Shkhara, in Svaneti, Georgia. High in the mountains of Georgia, between the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in a valley surrounded by 5,000-meter peaks, is Svanetia (Svaneti). The old men of this valley told me that the Svans are the descendants of Sumerian slaves that escaped their bondage and fled north to the Caucasus, where they worshiped the sun god Lile’. Because of this, in all my journals, I called them: “The Children of the Sun.” I stumbled into Svaneti with a hand drawn map and a handful of slide film, and no vision for storytelling, in 1998. But over the course of 107 rolls, taken in three journeys over three years (from 1998-2000), I learned to see. The result was my first photo story, and one that would lead to my career as a National Geographic photographer. Sixteen years after that first journey, National Geographic sent me back on assignment to find my family again, and to create a feature for the magazine. This photo was taken on that return journey. Ushguli is located at an altitude of 2,100 meters (6,900 ft) and is considered the highest continuously inhabited village in Europe. 6000 × 4000 pixels
