Lost silk road city located by Ghent University researcher

Il'Ichevsk - A researcher at Ghent University has identified a lost Silk Road city larger than medieval Ghent, London or Venice. Historians and archaeologists have been searching for nearly 200 years for the city of Magas, capital of the ninth to twelfth century kingdom of Alania. This Kingdom, located in the North Caucasus mountains of modern Russia, controlled a critical section of the Silk Roads: a trade route which connected East Asia and the Mediterranean centuries before the era of European expansion. John Latham-Sprinkle, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of History at Ghent University, claims in a new article that the city of Magas was located at Il'ichevsk, a fortress in the Krasnodar Krai region of Russia. This fortress covers an area of 600 hectares, with walls 15km long: an area larger than any city in Western Europe at this time. Previous excavations suggest that architects and masons from as far away as the Byzantine Empire worked on the city's walls and churches, which are among the oldest in all of modern Russia. "Although the North Caucasus is often considered a backwater today, this discovery demonstrates that this region has been historically vital for global connections.