Georgia (Caucasus)

Why Georgia (Caucasus) works

Georgia is a country in the Caucasus region on the east coast of the Black Sea, sitting at the intersection of Eastern Europe and West Asia and generally regarded as part of Europe. It is bordered to the north and northeast by Russia, to the west by the Black Sea, to the south by Turkey and Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. Its population of 3.9 million is concentrated heavily in Tbilisi, the capital and largest city, home to over a third of the country's people, and Georgians, native to the region, speak Georgian, a Kartvelian language unrelated to any other language family in the world.

In 580, the Sasanian Empire abolished the Kingdom of Iberia, and the region's constituent territories fragmented into feudal domains through the early Middle Ages as Roman-Persian wars brought chaos to the Caucasus, until the Byzantine Empire established control over Georgian territories by the end of the 6th century, ruling indirectly through a local Kouropalates. Arab forces invaded southeastern Georgia in 645, beginning an extended period of Muslim domination that produced feudal states such as the Emirate of Tbilisi and the Principality of Kakheti, while western Georgia remained largely a Byzantine protectorate. The nascent Georgian kingdom faced internal and geopolitical strain through much of the 11th century until ties with Byzantium normalized against the shared threat of the Seljuk Empire; after the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert in 1071, Constantinople entrusted Georgia with administering territory on its behalf, placing the kingdom at the centre of the war against the Turks in the 1080s, before the Kingdom of Georgia reached its height in the 12th and early 13th centuries.

Western Georgia's landscape ranges from lowland marsh-forests, swamps, and temperate rainforest to permanent snow and glaciers, while the eastern part of the country includes a small stretch of semi-arid plains. Much of the natural habitat across the low-lying areas of western Georgia has disappeared over the past century through agricultural development and urbanization, and the forests that once covered the Colchis plain survive today mainly within national parks and reserves, such as the Lake Paliastomi area; elsewhere, forest cover is concentrated along the foothills and mountains, with deciduous trees dominating western Georgia's woodlands below 600 metres.

Georgia is one of the oldest wine-producing countries in the world, and archaeological evidence shows grapevine cultivation and Neolithic wine production in its fertile valleys and slopes stretching back millennia; local tradition around wine is closely bound up with Georgian national identity. In 2013, UNESCO added the traditional Georgian winemaking method using kvevri clay jars to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Georgia's moderate, moist climate, shaped by the Black Sea, favours vine cultivation, and vineyards are worked intensively enough that grapevines are trained up the trunks of fruit trees in a method called maglari, hanging down alongside the fruit as it ripens; Kakheti, further divided into smaller micro-regions, is among the country's most established wine-growing areas.

Tbilisi's old town, at the country's demographic and cultural centre, sits within a landscape that runs from the Black Sea coast through the varied terrain of western Georgia to the dramatic mountains of the Caucasus range along the country's northern border. That combination of coast, wine country, mountains, and a capital shaped by successive Persian, Byzantine, Arab, and Russian influence over the centuries gives the country a layered architectural and cultural character, from Georgian Orthodox church architecture to the traditions of hospitality documented alongside its wine culture.

• Georgia (country) — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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