Hostility between Ossetians and Georgians stretches back at least as far as 1839 when Mikhail Lermontov, wrote “Demon”, a poem about the enmities that pervade life in the high mountains of the Caucasus.

When a Georgian prince was ambushed on his way to his wedding, “the wicked bullet of the Ossetian / found him in the darkness”, Lermontov wrote.