Defending the borders would be better re-titled Disillusionment on opening the borders. It is a study of the reactions to and consequences of the reopening (ajar in 1988, fully in 1991) at Sarp of the border between Turkey and Ajaria on the Black Sea, sealed virtually hermetically by Stalin in 1937. The village of Sarp and the small mountainous coastal region of Ajaria is distinct from the rest of Georgia: its population is largely Muslim (by conversion since the sixteenth century) and some of them belong to the Laz ethnos, mostly represented in north-east Turkey. In the 1990s free movement across the border allowed closely-knit extended families to resume their untrammelled contacts. Disillusion at the restoration of freedom was stronger and longer-lasting than the initial euphoria. Pelkman's analysis of the feelings and behaviour of the citizens of Batumi and Khulo confirms a similar trauma undergone by Circassians: in 1992 I spent a night on the concrete strip between the closed border-posts talking to a number of Circassian families who had driven up from Jordan (their place of exile in the 1860s) to be reunited with their cousins in Russian Circassia. They were returning without hope, all expectation of repatriation shattered: the intervening 130 years of separation had riven them apart. Soviet Circassia had weakened Muslim faith; their cousins saw nothing wrong with western-style dancing, with drinking vodka and ignoring Ramadan; exile in the Ottoman empire had made expatriate Circassians fervent and conservative Muslims. Likewise, Georgian Muslims found their Turkish relatives to be useful as purveyors of cheap household goods and purchasers of scrap metal, but intolerable as restrictive and puritanical Muslims (or sometimes excessively business-like Turkish Kemalists), while the Turkish cousins (whose knowledge of Georgian had deteriorated over the last fifty years and had not been passed onto the young generation) found their Georgian relatives to be idlers, either primitively pagan or provocatively European. Each side gravitated towards its political centre, the Ajarians feeling more Georgian, and often converting to Christianity, while the Turkish Georgians, especially the younger generation, happily discarded their Caucasian identity. Pelkman's analysis is delightful because it is derived from such close observation of a number of interesting individuals and families. It is a sad story of loss of identity, although, had that identity been re-established, the political consequences of cross-border loyalties could well have been sadder still.