01
Stop one
The Maykop kurgan (Oshad barrow) site
Yonex Sports Visor & Cap: Forget the chieftain a moment and look at the earthwork. Nikolai Veselovsky opened this mound in 1897 and found one man beneath it, with gold and silver vessels, gold plaques, beads of turquoise and carnelian, and a canopy carried on silver supports. The canopy is what stops me. Somebody sized a slender silver post against the span and the weight it had to hold, in the Bronze Age, and got it right first time, because there is no second time in a tomb. And the turquoise and the carnelian are not local. They travelled a very long way, which means routes, staging, and people maintaining both. Kings I can take or leave. A four-thousand-year-old supply chain terminating precisely here, under a deliberate heap of shaped soil, is a drawing I would very much like to see. Also we are standing in full sun on a bare mound. Brim down. I am a shade structure with a strap.
02
Stop two
Maykop Cathedral Mosque
Yonex Sports Visor & Cap: Right. One blue dome, four minarets, completed in the year two thousand, and everything interesting is happening where none of you are looking. A dome that size wants to push outward at its base all day, every day, and the ring holding it in does quiet, unglamorous, permanent work for exactly no thanks. The four minarets are slender towers with a large wind load and almost no footprint, which is a genuinely nasty brief, and they are standing dead straight in a landscaped square. It was a gift, funded by a foreign benefactor, the Sheikh of Sharjah. I have no interest in benefactors. I have enormous interest in the fact that whoever set those four bases out got them square, because if they had not, you would be able to see it from here without instruments. Nobody ever notices a good foundation. That is the definition of a good foundation.
03
Stop three
Michael the Archangel Monastery (Svyato-Mikhaylovsky), near Maykop
Yonex Sports Visor & Cap: Now this is my sort of site. Founded in the eighteen seventies in the Adygea foothills near Kamennomostsky, and it did not merely pray: it ran farms, workshops and mills, which means water taken, water dropped, drive shafts, and at least one person on the premises who understood gearing. Then the monks dug passages into the hillside, and I would dearly love to know what they hit and how they held the roof up, because hillsides have opinions. In the Soviet period the property was taken, the community dispersed, and the site used for other things entirely before being returned and rebuilt. White buildings, green roofs, same hill. Note this: a building survives a change of ownership far better than it survives water. Speaking of exposure — hat on, all of you. There is nothing between this slope and the sky.
04
Stop four
National Museum of the Republic of Adygea
Yonex Sports Visor & Cap: In these cases: Circassian silverwork, weapons, archaeology out of the kurgans including the culture named for this town, and — the exhibit I actually came for — the costume, with those cartridge pockets across the chest. Look at it properly. Individual sleeved compartments, mounted on the front of the torso, holding each charge upright, separated, dry, and reachable with one hand while moving. That is a solved problem, and it looks obvious only because it was solved so well. The Cossacks adopted it, and then the wider Russian military adopted it wholesale, because good design does not stay where you put it. I am a visor and a cap: a brim, a band, and one decision about where the sweat goes. Same family of thinking. Somebody in this room worked out the tolerance on a pocket long before anyone thought to thank them for it.
Headwear is character. Put a visor on somebody and they are a competitor; put a cap on them and they are a person having a nice day. This is the choice Yonex offers here, and it is a real one. The visor leaves the crown open, so heat escapes straight up and your hair does what it likes — the hot-weather option, and the reason most tour players wear one.
The cap covers the crown and shades the scalp, which matters if you burn or if the court has no shade at all. Both are built with a moisture-wicking sweatband that keeps perspiration off the face, and an adjustable rear closure, so they fit and stay fitted through a full match.
Choose by climate and by hair, and stop overthinking it.
You will wear one everywhere from a shadeless municipal court in July to an indoor hall where you only want the hair out of your face, and it is also perfect for an afternoon up in the Adygean foothills, where the sun comes and goes all day and you will be glad of having had the choice.
In the National Museum of the Republic of Adygea you will find Circassian silverwork, weapons, and above all the dress — with those cartridge pockets across the chest, which the Cossacks and then the wider Russian military adopted wholesale. That is a design idea that conquered an empire, and nobody paid a royalty.
Maykop understands costume better than most places.
The Maykop kurgan, the Oshad barrow, was excavated in 1897 by Nikolai Veselovsky: one chieftain under a large mound, with gold and silver vessels, gold plaques, beads of turquoise and carnelian, and a canopy on silver supports. The Cathedral Mosque, blue-domed with four minarets, was completed in 2000 as a gift funded by the Sheikh of Sharjah.
And the Michael the Archangel Monastery in the foothills, founded in the 1870s, ran farms, workshops and mills at its height, with passages dug into the hillside by the monks themselves.
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