The geological, material, and spiritual forces of the porous Transcaucasian regions of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan nourished the poetic imagination of the visionary Soviet Union director Sergei Parajanov. Born in 1924 in Georgia to Armenian parents, Parajanov's multilingual skills (in Russian, Georgian, and Armenian), along with his talents and training in music and singing, dancing and cinematography, enabled him to harness the many intersecting cultural resources of the Transcaucasia, with its deep civilizational history. Additionally, the cultural and spiritual practices of the Armenian Apostolic Church and Eastern Orthodox Christianity as well as Civilizational Islam (all religions of the Book), coexist in a unique manner in Parajanov's two major films, The Color of Pomegranates (Sayat Nova) (1969) and Ashik Kerib (1988), which are both situated within the multi-ethnic zone of Transcaucasia. Parajanov synthesized this rich variety of elements to create a singular flexible cinematic idiom. Historically, Transcaucasia was a contact zone of diverse peoples, languages, and cultures who came with the caravan trade routes (part of the Silk Road), and the Persian and Ottoman Turk invasions that introduced Islam to what was hitherto an ancient Apostolic and Orthodox Christian world. As Peter Brown says, Armenian culture ‘drew strange vigor from existing side by side with a continuing epic world or pre-Christian customs and oral tradition’. The pre-Islamic Persian influence, a legacy of war, was also an important aspect of the life of the nobility, who were ‘highly Iranized in social structure and lay culture’.