The Caucasus republic that hosted humanity's earliest winemaking
Georgia sits on the Black Sea's east coast at Europe's and West Asia's hinge, generally counted European, with Russia north and Turkey and Armenia south. Prehistoric habitation includes the world's earliest known winemaking sites; classical Colchis and Iberia seeded the modern state.
Georgia has about 3.9 million people and borders Russia to the north, Turkey and Armenia to the south and Azerbaijan to the southeast, with the Black Sea on its western flank. Greek and Roman writers from Herodotus to Tacitus called the western Georgians Colchians and the eastern ones Iberians. Georgians themselves say Sakartvelo, land of the Kartvelians, built from the Kartli region with the usual sa-…-o place pattern; chroniclers traced it to a legendary ancestor named Kartlos, but scholars link it to an ancient tribe, the Karts.
The English name first appears, in Italian, on Pietro Vesconte's world map of 1320, and early Latin writers often spelled it Jorgia. Travellers credited Saint George or a Greek farming word, yet most scholars now trace it to the Persian Gurj, perhaps tied to a place name meaning land of wolves. Tbilisi has lobbied other states to drop the Russian form Gruzia; Israel, Japan, South Korea and Hungary switched after 2006, and Lithuania adopted Sakartvelas in 2020.
Fossils at Dmanisi, about 1.8 million years old, are the oldest hominins known in Eurasia, and farming began at least by the 6th millennium BC. Colchis in the west, where Greek myth placed the Golden Fleece, was rich by the 14th century BC and traded with Greek colonies such as Phasis. In the east, Iberia took shape after Alexander the Great's conquest, and in 337 King Mirian III made Christianity its state religion. Persia abolished that kingdom in 580, and Arab armies arrived in 645, leaving rival emirates and principalities.
The Bagrationi dynasty rose in the early 9th century when Ashot I, building from Tao-Klarjeti, was recognised as presiding prince of Iberia by both the Abbasids and Byzantium. Much later, after the 1917 revolution, Georgia had a brief independence before the Red Army annexed it in 1921, and it left the Soviet Union in April 1991. Reforms since 2003 produced one of the world's freest business climates, and in 2018 it became the second country, and the first former socialist state, to legalise cannabis. It is now an official candidate for EU membership.
Source: Georgia (country)
